The Unraveling
by Catsy
Summary: The first month of SAO as told from the perspective of a husband-and-wife team, Kadyn and Camilla. First-person OC viewpoint but fits within canon. Canon characters: primarily Diabel, Agil and Kirito; minor roles for Argo, Kibaou and others not explicitly named in the story.
1. Prologue: Launch Day

In a life filled with fleeting, ephemeral scenes of daily normalcy, there are moments which stay with you. A sequence of memories which stands out from the rest, playing over and over again in your mind like frames from a segment of 20th century analog film. Sometimes the reason is obvious: the day you graduated from high school, your first kiss, the first time you held a lover in your arms. All of these formative moments are part of the ineffable gestalt that is a _person_, and it's hardly surprising that bits of them would be burned into our long-term memory, for they are inextricably associated with who and what we've become up to this point.

And then there are the moments that should be utterly forgettable, scenes from a memory that have no apparent rhyme or reason for feeling so significant. Perhaps one of the many times when a teacher scolded you for some minor infraction, or the color of the pen you used to do your 4th grade homework. Ordinary conversations with friends and family that seem to have no greater significance to the tapestry of your life than a single stitch has to an elaborate quilt.

I maintain that the latter kind of memory is just as significant as the first. That one loose stitch, invisible to a casual inspection, can be responsible for the unraveling of the whole. The difference between the former and the latter is that we don't necessarily know _why_ they are significant.

Yet.

My name is Seiji Midorikawa. By any objective measure I have lived an unremarkable life of no significance. I work 60 hours a week as a software developer for a struggling vendor of casual Internet games. My evenings and weekends are spent absorbed in online games with my wife of ten years. My greatest success in life has been to have the good fortune of being married to a person who is, in my estimation, the most imperfectly wonderful woman in the world. And on one October Sunday in the 28th year of my life, I found myself haunted by an utterly unremarkable conversation I'd had with my wife earlier in the day while we were waiting in line to buy a new game called _Sword Art Online_. In the days to come, I would worry at the memory like the empty socket of a tooth I couldn't remember having pulled.

**October 31st, 2022  
****Akihabara, Japan**

"You're brooding, dear."

My wife's voice broke me free of my thoughts, which had put me into a state of oblivious introspection that she calls, with tolerant affection, "visiting the land of the Forest Elves". I hadn't even noticed that the line had advanced, I'd simply been daydreaming while plodding forward on autopilot whenever a tiny part of my awareness registered that the person beside me was moving.

"Earth to Seiji, kshhhht, this is Mission Control. Beep." The last word was spoken, not a sound effect, as she poked me in the side with one finger in the spot she knew damn well was ticklish.

That drew a laugh and a startled jump from me, and after rubbing my side I stretched languidly as if waking from a long nap. "I'm here, Rebecca. Just thinking."

"Mm. Forest Elves?"

"Yeah, sorta. I was just thinking about the game. You sure we want to jump right in next Sunday when the game first opens? I'd like to look up a few more FAQs first, maybe see if there are any bugs at launch. Get all our affairs in order before we turn ourselves into drooling vegetables with an IV drip." It had been a running joke between she and I ever since I told her I was taking two weeks off work for the SAO launch.

As an obvious mixed-nationality couple, we were used to drawing stares whenever we went out in public together, but my wife's choice of wardrobe for the day probably didn't help. The bright green sun dress complemented the deep orange-red of her natural hair color, and showed off her long legs to good effect. Standing in line to buy a video game, surrounded by geeks of every shape and description, I wasn't the only one who'd been appreciating it. She was pretty and saw no reason not to flaunt it, and I for one had been enjoying the flaunting.

"Honestly, Seiji, how can you not be excited?"

Rebecca's exasperation was plain on her face, though it was tempered with the good-natured tolerance of a spouse's foibles and quirks that comes from a decade of life together. Neon and digital lights from hundreds of electronic billboards painted her pale skin with rainbow colors, almost hiding her freckles.

I tried to put what I was thinking into words. Like most dreams, the daydream I'd been having was fading rapidly, leaving me to try to describe a rainbow to a blind person. "I _am_ excited," I protested. "It's just… different, is all."

"You mean different in some way other than being science fiction come to life and devoted to the noble cause of advancing the quality of online gaming by an order of magnitude?"

"I don't know," I said as we moved forward a few more feet. "Color me paranoid, but playing together on the Internet is one thing—I'm not sure how I feel about a device that messes with our brains. Think about it, Rebecca: it's full-sensory, right?"

"That's the idea." She gave me that look that told me I was being _atarimae-sama—_or as she so colorfully put it in her native language, Captain Obvious.

"So it intercepts the things we tell our bodies to do, and sends back signals that fool us into feeling things that aren't there. That doesn't scare you just a little?"

"Hey, if you don't want it, I'll buy your copy," said a teenager in line behind us. He'd been ogling Rebecca pretty much the entire time we'd been standing here, and although I didn't really care about that—we were used to it, and it was flattering more than anything else—he'd chosen the wrong time to butt in.

"Bite me," my wife and I both said in unison, before turning to look at each other and laughing. The youth tensed up, looking like he wanted to make something of it, but said nothing. Perhaps he wasn't quite sure how to react to the redheaded American woman at my side who'd just told him off in fluent Japanese with a faint Kansai accent.

"Don't get me wrong," she said, turning back to me as if the teen hadn't spoken. "It _is_ a little scary. Change usually is, especially to Japanese." Another poke in my ticklish spot, this time almost parried by me. "But this is the next step in gaming that we've been waiting for since… since… well, ever! Argus has invested millions in the development of the NerveGear. It's Kayaba's life's work. People have been using it for months now, even if the first apps for it were lame. A thousand people played the SAO closed beta. You think it would've gotten this far if it wasn't safe?"

When she put it that way, there wasn't really much I could say to argue the point. We were a study in contrasts, my wife and I—and not just in the obvious physical ways. I was prone to spacing out to the land of the Forest Elves, with a quirky sense of humor and a tendency to chew on odd thoughts about the most random of things like a dog that didn't want to let go of its favorite bone. Rebecca, on the other hand, was possessed of remarkably pragmatic good sense and lived very much in the here and now, even when gaming. Especially when gaming.

"You," she declared suddenly, "are no fun at all. Maybe I'll sell your copy to the annoying kid after all." To a casual listener, this might have sounded like an absolutely shocking level of disrespect from a wife to her husband, especially in Japan. I knew it was nothing but affectionate teasing, and I responded by pinching her ass, which stunned the annoying kid back into silence when he was about to protest being called an annoying kid.

"In seriousness, though," Rebecca added after smoothing down her dress, "that's why they have product safety inspection…" She trailed off as if looking for the right term. I knew she hadn't forgotten the Japanese words for "department" or "bureau" or any of the other synonyms for government agencies, she simply never bothered to learn more about the structure of the government than she had to. Politics bored her. "Stuff," she said finally.

"Stuff," I agreed. That kind of verbal echo was a common touchstone between us. I slipped an arm around her waist as we advanced closer to the front of the line. "Anyway, at this rate we'll be home by noon. Plenty of time to get a bite to eat, and for me to scour the net for more info from the beta."

"Good luck with that," Rebecca said, smirking. "Most of them aren't talking."

"Most of them were noobs. I can't believe we didn't get in. We've been playing online games since before some of those kids were much more than a broken rubber."

Out of the many things about my wife for which I'm grateful, the fact that she doesn't embarrass easily and appreciates my twisted sense of humor ranks high on the list. She staggered against the window of an electronics store as she laughed uncontrollably, backlit by the screens of a dozen televisions showing a newscast of the line we were in. It stretched down the block, around the corner, and… I couldn't see the end of it in the shot.

It didn't matter. We were almost to the front. My wife turned to me suddenly as we approached the counter, seizing my arm and literally bouncing on her toes with excitement while making a _squeeing_ sound. Until that moment I don't think I'd ever heard a person actually "squee" before, but she managed it. I took a moment to admire the effect of the bouncing, and stepped up to the counter.

"Two copies: pre-order under Midorikawa, as in 'green' and 'river'; Seiji as in 'oath' and 'earth'."

As I paid the clerk the remaining balance and accepted the bag with the pair of sky blue boxes, I found myself thinking back to the conversation we'd had in line. I'd been in the land of the Forest Elves, but the daydream had receded. It hadn't just been about the irrational misgivings I'd voiced to Rebecca, there had been something more to it. I felt like I should _know_.

Then the moment passed, and Rebecca and I ran to the train station as fast as our legs would carry us, laughing the whole way.


	2. Link Start

To an outside observer unaware that this was Launch Day for Sword Art Online, the lunch that my wife and I shared wouldn't have seemed in any way out of the ordinary—for us, at any rate. I was perched at my desktop computer, eating microwaved nattou and rice while I hunted for any last tidbits of information about the beta that I could find. Rebecca was camped out on one of the couches with her tablet, sketching different character designs for my avatar with a light pen and occasionally reaching over to type on her laptop. To all appearances, we seemed to be completely ignoring each other's presence. In actuality, we were having three different conversations in three different places—private instant messaging to each other, a SAO web forum where we were arguing about character builds, and in guild chat for an MMO that we were probably going to be quitting after today.

That didn't stop us from occasionally acknowledging each other out loud. I heard Rebecca make a gagging sound behind me, and turned to see her wrinkling her nose. "Did you _have_ to do that? Today?"

I didn't insult her by pretending not to know what she meant, and shoveled the last of my lunch down. "Sorry," I said, not feeling especially sorry. My wife _hated_ the smell of nattou with a passion. To me, it was ambrosia that reminded me of childhood, a comfort food like no other; to her, it looked and smelled like (as she once put it) spoiled dinosaur snot. And whenever I pulled out a frozen chunk of the fermented soybean paste and microwaved it, it filled the house with a… shall we say, a delicate aroma.

[_You're lucky I love you,_] she wrote in IM, the message prefixed with "Camilla"—the name she always used for her main character. [_But so help me if you try to kiss me before we dive…_]

[_Look at it this way_,] I responded in the same medium, my own messages prefixed with "Kadyn". [_Once we dive, all of your senses will be cut off_.]

[Camilla: _Perhaps there is a God,_] came the reply as she snickered out loud.

[Kadyn: _Only if they have nattou in Aincrad_.]

[Camilla: _…I changed my mind. I hate you._]

I half-turned in my chair and grinned over my shoulder at her. She smiled sweetly and made an indelicate gesture. "Check your guild chat," she said.

I tabbed over to the game, where our characters were idling in the house she and I shared there. One look at the guild chat window told me why she'd called me over. [[I can't believe you're doing this to us,]] whined our guild leader, Keiko. At least, I read it in a whiny tone of voice, probably because I was sick of getting grief for the leave of absence we were taking.

[[It's two weeks, Keiko,]] I wrote back, sighing. [[If you can't scare up a replacement tank and ranger for two weeks, the guild's got bigger problems that have nothing to do with us.]]

[[But it's not just two weeks,]] she persisted. [[And you know it. Once you dive, you're going to be spoiled for any other game. We need you.]] Meaning they needed Camilla's tanking. DPS characters like mine were a dime a dozen.

Rebecca and I met each other's eyes. [_Sour grapes_,] she messaged me in English.

I nodded; we really didn't need to say anything more. Keiko had actually been in the SAO closed beta, but she'd been unable to get one of the 10,000 copies from the game's first printing. She was jealous and had been completely insufferable. Privately, since Rebecca and I hadn't been able to get into the beta, we'd had a hard time feeling any sympathy. She'd taken her own leave of absence for the beta, so it was a bit hypocritical of her to flip us shit over it.

But she'd been a guildie for several years and we considered her a friend, so we couldn't just say, _why yes, Keiko, you're being a complete bitch about this and I wish you'd just shut up and stop whining at us so that we can enjoy our moment of glory._

Well, _I_ wouldn't, at any rate. I'd been half-expecting Rebecca to say something like that by now, but we kept a lid on it by making snarky comments to each other in IM.

Besides, when it all came down to it… Keiko was probably right. If SAO was as incredible as the hype made it out to be, chances are we weren't coming back.

* * *

It was probably the first time in weeks that our bed had been properly made. Most of the time it was one of those little details that we just couldn't be bothered with—who was really here to see, other than us? Rebecca had changed into a slip and was sitting on the side of the bed with the Nerve Gear helmet in her lap, cradling it like a favorite child and watching the clock intently. Four minutes until 1:00 PM, which was when the SAO servers were supposed to officially come online.

I walked into the room with a pair of water bottles, and tossed one to her. She caught it one-handed and set the Nerve Gear aside, picking up her tablet and running her finger down the screen. "Okay, time for the checklist."

I rolled my eyes as I sat down on the other side of the bed. "Do we have to do this?" Rebecca was obsessed with checklists. She always said it was the only way she could keep everything in life straight. I put up with it because my organization skills were legendary for their nonexistence.

"Yessss, we do."

I sighed with mock resignation. "Very well. On with it."

"Okay, router?"

"Just rebooted."

"Check. Doors?"

"All locked."

"Check. Cats?"

"Fed and watered. Fresh litter." Which was not the last thing I'd wanted to be doing before diving into this world.

"Good. Check. Voicemail message?"

I affected my "radio" voice, projecting a little bit more and imitating an infomercial reader. Sometimes I just about killed our guildmates doing this in voice chat. "Hello, you've reached the home of Seiji and Rebecca. No one is here right now, because we're off farming loot and pwning noobs in a virtual world along with 9,998 other people who have no lives. You can leave a message at the beep, but we probably won't get it until next week."

Rebecca giggled furiously. "Check. Asshole. Plants?"

"Watered. _You_ did that."

"I know, but I'm just going down the list. Check. Vacation flags?"

She was referring to a status we toggled on all of our online characters, indicating that we were on "vacation" from the game and shouldn't be deleted. "Set."

"Check. Next of kin?"

"Yep—err, what?"

She laughed. "Kidding. But I did call Mom and let her know what we were doing."

"Did she freak?"

"Bear, woods."

"Right. Okay, anything else?"

Rebecca diligently scanned the list one more time, and stopped to think. "Nope. I think that's it." She changed applications and tossed me the tablet. "That's the final revision of the avatar I drew for you."

I took a good look at the character on the screen, committing the details to memory—once I logged in, I wouldn't be able to reference this image or any other outside information without dropping out of the game completely. As far as we could tell, SAO didn't have an in-game web browser or anything like that.

It was about as far from my real appearance as you could get. Instead of the generic boring brown of my perpetually unruly hair, the avatar had a long ponytail of the same red as my wife's natural color. Where I was short and slender, the avatar was tall with a wiry but well-toned build. Where I could never seem to grow more facial hair than an uneven scruff, my character had a pointy goatee. And of course the avatar didn't need reading glasses.

"I love it. You did a great job." I glanced at the clock. "Almost time."

Rebecca leaned over towards the middle of the bed and grabbed my hands, pulling me down. "I'm so excited I could burst!"

I grinned. "Save it for the mobs. I bet you we make level 10 by the end of the day."

"Challenge?"

"You're on."

We lay there for a few moments, just looking at each other. I knew that her thoughts must be somewhat similar to mine: thinking how lucky we were, not just to have gotten a chance to play this game on opening day, but to be able to share the experience together. She impulsively leaned over and planted a kiss on me.

Then she broke the mood, swiping melodramatically at her mouth. "Oh gross, I can still taste it!"

"I brushed!" I protested.

"That crap is evil. Evil, I tell you." As she spoke, I was watching the clock, and the seconds were slowly ticking towards 1:00.

I leaned over and kissed her on the top of her head as she made a face. "I love you."

"I love you too," she said as she buckled the Nerve Gear on her head and squirmed until she was comfortable. "But nattou is still the devil's work."

It was an old conversation for us, time-worn to the point where there was no heat in the disagreement. Just the differences that made life worth living. As we laid back on the bed, our heads encased in the Nerve Gear devices, our hands stole towards each other and our fingers linked together.

As one, we said, "Link start!"

* * *

**Terms and Gamer Jargon:**

**Noob: **Newbie. A player who is so new to a game that they either don't know anything or seem so. Usually derogatory.

**Pwn:** Usually pronounced "pone", like "bone". A deliberate garbling of the English word "own", meaning to dominate someone else in an online game. Can also express that something is awesome, e.g. "this pwns".

**10-18-2012:** Corrected Seiji's hair color, fixed the guild chat dialogue tags that FFN butchered, replaced the double hyphens that FFN butchered with em dashes. Minor adjustments to narrative wording.

**10-21-2012: **Added definition footnotes.


	3. Noobs

It had been three months since the beginning of the SAO closed beta, and ever since then my wife and I had been voraciously devouring any strategy guides or game mechanics details we could find online—which had been far less than we'd liked.

For most games—unless there was some kind of non-disclosure agreement—the testers in a closed beta tended to be very open with what they learned from it. It was usually an opportunity to leverage their exclusive knowledge into personal influence and visibility by answering questions on forums and writing FAQs. Many an obscure player made a name for themselves by being the first to write a strategy guide for a particular aspect of a new game.

SAO was different. Most of the beta testers had been keeping things close to the vest. Still, SAO wasn't the first application for the Nerve Gear—just the most exciting and ambitious to date—so the details of how the link worked were common knowledge for anyone who spent the time to read up on it.

But it was one thing to read a description of the calibration sequence, or of the way your senses fade to nothing before being replaced by the input from the Nerve Gear. Living through it was something else entirely.

As the VR helmet powered up, I felt a faint itch at the back of my neck, a tingling in my extremities-like someone was tickling the root of my soul with the lightest feather in the world. We had already run through the calibration sequence, which involved touching ourselves all over while the Nerve Gear recorded the responses of our nervous systems, and I could feel the sensation of the bed below me and my wife's hand in mine fading, replaced by a few heartbeats of hollow nothingness like what I imagined weightlessness in space would have felt like if you couldn't actually feel your body.

My eyes were closed, but something that was both every color at once and not a color at all danced behind my eyelids, pixellating and seeming to rush towards me in a way that should have given me a vicious sense of vertigo, but didn't. At last, after what seemed like an eternity but which in reality was probably only a couple of seconds, a welcome screen appeared, prompting me to login.

It was unlike any other login sequence I had ever seen. The phrase "welcome screen" would imply that there was some sort of terminal before me, a monitor or display of some kind with which I could interact. Instead, it was simply _there—_as if my entire world consisted of a pastel-colored background and the welcome message and login prompt were simply a HUD overlaid upon my vision like the display on a pair of augmented reality glasses.

We'd already created accounts beforehand to save time, so I looked at the prompt and tried to figure out how I was supposed to enter my credentials. As I did, I watched the username and password that were fixed in my mind fill in rapidly as if I'd used a web browser's autocomplete feature.

This was _too cool_.

When it came to character creation, the system prompted me to choose a gender-I'd never really liked playing female characters, and since the Nerve Gear already knew I was male I accepted the default. Character creation was… indescribable. In most games you'd have a series of sliders that controlled things like the height of your cheekbones or the shape of your eyes. The range of complexity offered in SAO was unimaginably rich, and if it hadn't been based on a direct brain-machine interface I'm not sure how they could've gotten away with it.

Rebecca—I forced myself to start thinking of her as Camilla again, the way we always did when we were gaming—was doubtlessly going to have an easier time; she liked the way she looked and preferred to play characters that looked like herself. After a few minutes of fiddling with the settings and selecting from a boring-looking choice of starting clothes, I accepted the changes and advanced to the next step.

I'd expected that to be a further fleshing-out of my character's background or abilities, but no such screen came up. We knew that there were no job or class systems in SAO, and that it was very much a usage-based progression system that started you from a blank slate, but I'd still expected some kind of customization beyond my character's appearance. Instead, the appearance window vanished and was replaced by a loading screen.

The sense of nothingness in which I was floating began to fade, a tingling returning to my limbs along with an indescribable sensation that felt completely alien to me until I realized what it was: gravity. Or at least, the game's approximation of what gravity should feel like to a person. The gentle beeps and chimes of the system messages and effects began fading into a murmur of sound, a murmur which became the noise of a thousand voices clamoring.

After a moment, I realized that the black nothingness had become a different kind of darkness: the kind you see with your eyes closed. Slowly, with a sense of extreme disorientation, I opened them.

What I saw stole my breath away. I was standing in the middle of a vast circular cobblestone courtyard, a tall and somewhat phallic monument of what looked like obsidian inscribed with thousands of words in English script placed in the very center. Thousands upon thousands of what I assumed were other players were standing around me, either slack-jawed in awe like I was or exclaiming loudly to each other. If I focused on one, I could see a green cursor hanging over their head and a thick line of the same color in a quarter-circle around their head at chin height, the latter of which I knew indicated their hit points. No names or numbers or other identifying marks were displayed.

I saw flashes of blue light constantly appear here and there wherever there was an open space, and when those columns of light faded a person would be standing there. I made a mental note: that's what a spawn or teleport effect looks like.

"There you are, Kadyn!"

The voice was familiar and welcome, and the words were accompanied by a heavy thump that sent me staggering off-balance. I landed in a heap on the ground with my wife on top of me, laughing bell-like as she tried to get control of her body. When rolled onto my back beneath her and looked up, I could see a window hanging between us that said _Report harrassment? Yes/No_. Since the window didn't have a _Hell No_ option, I reached out and carefully touched the _No_ button. The window disappeared.

"What took you so long?" she asked, grinning down at me. She didn't remark on the pop-up window; from what we'd read you couldn't see another player's HUD or menus.

"Chargen," I answered, my own grin as silly and childlike as hers. "I had more changes to make than you did." Apparently I'd done a good job from memory; she recognized the appearance that she'd designed for me. Her avatar looked remarkably and predictably similar to how she was in real life, aside from a slightly manga-like stylization of her features that I assumed from looking around was just part of the game's art style, and a lack of the freckles that I loved so much. Other than that, it was like… like…

"It's like it's real," Camilla breathed, rubbing her nose against mine. I marveled at how I could feel her warmth on top of me, and how it was different from the warmth of the sunlight that I also felt, and the comfortable chill of the cobblestone street beneath me. We both tried to stand up, and found ourselves staggering awkwardly as we tried to master our movements.

"I feel like a little kid," I said, not sure whether I was talking about our sense of wonder or our difficulty controlling our bodies. Maybe both. We could see that we weren't the only people having this difficulty, either—even most of the people who'd mastered the arcane art of standing upright had a kind of robotic jerkiness to them, as if each motion was something they stopped and thought about beforehand rather than simply _doing_.

A few stood out from the crowd by not having these difficulties. A furtive-looking youth with a cloak and hood, a tall man about my age who was looking around as if searching for something or someone he knew should be here, and a suave-looking teen with anime-styled black hair who was dashing into a side street all had an air of absolute comfort in their bodies. _Beta-testers_, I realized suddenly. _Lucky bastards. They move like they don't even have to think about it-they've done this before._

Maybe that was the trick. I'd been focusing on using my muscles, not really sure to what degree of realism our avatars were simulated, but each time I thought something like "left leg, take a step", it was like the unnatural awkwardness of manipulating the rigging on a 3D model. I tried to relax, closing my eyes for a moment and focusing on my breathing.

I wasn't breathing.

Panic rose up in my throat. _Why_ wasn't I breathing? And then it hit me: of course. Breathing, like our heartbeats, was an automatic function that was associated with a completely different part of our brains than the ones intercepted by the Nerve Gear. Interfering with that part of the brain could kill us, a thought which threatened to bring the panic back in force. I took a deep breath, and could actually feel the sensation of air passing my lips as my chest swelled. As I relaxed, I found my chest rising and falling lightly in concert with my thoughts, and after a few seconds I opened my eyes and stood up.

That was much better. The less I focused on moving, the more natural it felt. Camilla looked to have reached a similar conclusion, although her sense of balance still seemed off as she took a few steps towards me.

"Doing better?" I asked.

"Much," she replied with that silly grin still plastered on her face. "Speaking of which…" Camilla leaned in and kissed me, tentatively at first but then with some enthusiasm. "Mm. No nattou. There is a God."

I pulled back a little bit and stuck my tongue out, giving her a raspberry. Again I saw the harassment window pop up and prompt me to report my wife for kissing me, and rolled my eyes. "That's getting annoying. We need to do something about it."

"What is?" And then Camilla's eyes darted to one side; she seemed to be seeing some sort of warning in her own HUD. A pretty pout came across her features. "Oh, now that sucks. Is it going to do that every time I touch you?"

"Not if we get married." The irony was rich.

"Well, _someone's_ been reading the FAQ."

"One of us has to," I teased, knowing that she was at least as diligent as I was at studying up on a new game before playing it. In retaliation she laughed and poked at my ticklish spot.

I almost jumped a little out of reflex, but nothing happened. She poked again. Nothing except the harassment window, which I dismissed with annoyance a third time. How hard was it to add a _Don't ask me this again_ checkbox?

"Oh that is _so not fair_."

I laughed, grabbing her hand and dragging her off towards one of the side streets that led out of this massive courtyard. "Oh, yes it is. Come on, let's go explore! It's really loud here." I assumed this must be the starting point for when new players logged in; bright blue fountains of light were still leaping up from the ground here and there and depositing a new player in an open space every few seconds. It was getting louder and crazier in here by the minute as ten thousand people logged in as soon as their own schedules allowed.

Laughing like children with a new toy—which was pretty much what we were at that point, despite both of us being closer in age to 30 than to 20—we sped off into the Starting City, seeing what kind of trouble we could find.

* * *

It took the better part of two hours to find NPC equipment vendors that had what we were looking for, and thankfully we already had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to play, if not necessarily how to go about building those characters. Camilla would take on her longstanding role as a plate tank, focusing on heavy armor and shield and probably a sword of some kind. I would focus on stealth, DPS and utility, and based on what I'd read I decided to go with a dagger and pure Agility-based build. I'd still have to bring up my Strength to be able to equip some of the higher-level weapons and armor later on, even the light stuff—but for now I could easily get by with pumping my AGI.

The nice thing about a dagger, from what little I'd been able to glean, was that it allowed you to apply status effects like poison and paralysis with the tip. Daggers weighed almost nothing and would allow me to maximize my speed, making it easier to get behind a mob and incapacitate them while Camilla kept their attention. It would leave me with very little defense, and I'd probably want to use at least a leather cuirass of some sort so that I wouldn't be a glass cannon, but since Camilla and I would always be partying together, I could rely on her to keep the mob's hate off of me.

It took long enough that both of us actually started getting a little thirsty, to our surprise. We'd known that the game had food and drink, but had assumed that it was just there to show off the game's capacity for simulating the sense of taste. We shouldn't be able to notice any physical sensations from our real bodies, and after asking a passing player we finally were amazed to learn that a sense of simulated thirst and hunger were actually an intended game mechanic that would persist in-game between login sessions.

Camilla tapped her foot as the helpful beta-tester—at least, we assumed that's what they were—disappeared into the crowd. "That's… I can't decide whether that's completely awesome or a case of putting realism before fun."

"I think it's awesome," I said, searching for an NPC food vendor and buying a few flasks of cheap water and some awful-looking black bread. "From what he said there's a Cooking skill and an almost infinite variety of ingredients; I'm going to try that out once we've got our combat skills set." I paused, and then gave Camilla a mischievous look. "I wonder what other biological needs they've realistically simulated."

The look she gave in reply smoldered. "Well, after we grind some EXP today, what say we find an inn and try a little grinding of another sort?"

I held out an arm limply, as if to say _twist my arm_. She reached out and lightly tweaked my wrist. "Ow," I said unconvincingly. "But we _really _have to get rid of that goddamn annoying harassment message first." I reached up and made a pinching gesture in the air before me, dragging downwards as if operating a zipper. The system menu appeared, and I hunted around in the menus until I found what I was looking for.

Camilla's gaze shifted as my character's marriage request produced a confirmation dialog in her vision. Her hand hovered in the air in mock indecision. "Oh, wow, Kadyn… it's so soon…" She clapped both hands to her cheeks and wobbled like one of those annoying characters in a teenage girl's manga series. "Decisions, decisions…"

I said nothing, preening as if I was too vain to care about what choice she made.

"Oh, I suppose it's all right," she finally said as if the outcome had ever been in question, "I want to get laid later." She tapped the air in front of her and I got a pop-up indicating that our characters were now "married" according to the game. It was a little like being guildmates, but supposedly we could also see each other's inventories and status screens—and the system's harassment prevention code would assume we didn't mind being touched by the other person.

As we walked towards the city gates, both of us looked down at the starter weapons we'd just equipped, and laughed. As pathetic as this equipment and our stats were, in some ways this was the best part of any new game, when everything was new to us and we'd be leveling up and getting new abilities more quickly than later when we were doing endgame content. I tried spinning the dagger in my fingers, and made Camilla fall over laughing when the dagger went tumbling into the grass.

"Hey look," she said, pointing. "Boars."

"Oh, now _that's_ original."

"Better than rats or slimes." She unsheathed a plain steel sword and hefted the small wooden buckler that had been the only shield she could afford. "Come on, let's go kill some stuff before this area gets flooded with noobs."

Her demeanor became more focused and serious as we stalked the creature, testing its aggro radius. I shoved aside the next joke that had come to mind and hung back a few paces behind her, waiting for her to pull. Eventually the boar stopped snuffling and going through its idle animations, and turned towards us. The yellow cursor over the mob's head turned red and it stamped the ground angrily.

"Incoming," Camilla said, and ran towards the boar with her shield up.

There was a terrible impact sound as they collided, and I saw her HP drop by about a tenth as the swing of her shield failed to fully deflect the boar's snout. "Ow," she said, jumping back and dodging the boar as it charged past her.

"Really?"

"Actually, no," she said with some surprise. "I felt the impact and there was a kind of numbness in my shield arm, but—whoa!"

"No pain?" I asked as she jumped out of the way again.

"No, and you know, you could get in here and help."

I was already moving. As she hacked and slashed at the boar, deflecting its attacks when she couldn't dodge them, I ran in and stabbed down at its flank.

"Is it just me," Camilla said with a grunt, "or are we not doing any damage to this thing?"

"We're chipping away at it, but each attack only seems to be doing a point of damage or so. Its HP has barely dropped."

We both backed off, and after we'd traveled a certain distance the boar stamped its hooves once more and snorted, then turned away. We'd tethered it by going outside of the area in which it spawned.

"Okay," she said. "New plan."

"New plan," I echoed. Then I focused on her character, glancing at the gauge beside her head. "Hey, you're yellow."

Her hit points had dropped just below half. "Thank you for noticing," my wife replied wryly. Now that we were out of combat, I could see her HP gauge ticking up extremely slowly. If we had to wait for the excruciatingly slow health regen in between every battle, we'd have a lot of downtime; potions were going to be a necessity. "I think we're doing something wrong here."

I was already looking through my system menu, navigating to my Skills section. "Aha!" I said. "Go into your Skills, and look up whatever skill it set when you equipped that sword."

"'One-Handed Straight Sword'," she read out loud. "Oh I see; there's a list of techniques. Well, _technique_, singular. 'Horizontal'. The hell kind of a name is that for an attack?"

The boar was roaming near us again, but we were outside of its territory. I still eyed it uneasily, not sure what surprises this game had for us. "I think we have to learn the motions for them. This isn't some hack-and-slash, button mash game." I looked closely at the window that came up when I selected my One-Handed Dagger skill, nodding. "Okay, I think I've got this. Try again?"

Camilla's eyes drifted up and to the left. I did the same thing, and noticed the HUD in the upper left corner of my vision. We were partied, and beside her name it showed a gauge similar to the one that arced around her avatar's head. It was somewhere around 75%. Our eyes returned to each other's, and she nodded.

This time it went much, much more smoothly. Camilla was getting better at the motions of parrying and blocking the boar's basic attacks, and dodging out of the way when it charged. As she jousted with it, I crept up behind it and experimented with the position of my dagger until it began glowing, signaling the correct motion input for executing an attack skill.

_Now_, I thought. As I did, I felt my body move without me, lunging forward and stabbing at the boar. Close to a third of its HP dropped off. "Yuss!" I cried out. "That was _so damn cool_."

"Watch it!" Camilla's warning came a touch too late. For a brief moment after the technique, I'd felt like I was frozen in place—like the motion input of the game had locked up. I realized that this must be some sort of cooldown or recovery time as the boar's snout slammed into my chest, sending me sailing backwards to land on my ass with a chunk of my HP down. It put its head down and charged.

"Oh no you don't!" As the boar was charging at me while I struggled back to my feet, Camilla leaned her sword against her shoulder in a particular way, and the blade began to glow brightly. Right before the mob was about to ram into me, she shot forward in a streak of light and slashed at the boar as she passed. There was a bright flash of red, and the remainder of the boar's HP gauge drained off. The creature exploded into a fireworks display of green polygons, and a window popped up in front of each of us to congratulate us on winning the battle and tell us how much EXP and money we'd earned.

Camilla was still standing there in the position she'd been in when the technique ended, her sword thrust out before her and her shield arm hanging back as if she was in mid-stride. She looked completely astonished at what had just happened. "That… that was…"

I walked over to her as she sheathed her sword, both of us grinning ear to ear. Practically in unison, we said, "This is the coolest game ever!"

* * *

**Terms and Gamer Jargon: **Lots of new terms in this chapter for anyone who hasn't played online games before.

**Aggro:** Used as a noun, refers to the level of "hate" that an enemy has towards a player character, affecting who that enemy targets or prioritizes. Used as a verb, refers either to the act of causing an enemy to initiate combat with a group or target, or to the enemy's act of doing so.

**DPS: **Damage Per Second, a common objective measure of the combat effectiveness for a character, skill or weapon. Player characters who focus primarily or solely on dealing damage are called DPS characters.

**Cooldown:** A period of time after using a skill during which the character either cannot act or cannot reuse that same skill. Sometimes called a _recovery_ or _reuse_ timer, respectively.

**EXP:** Experience points. A common gameplay convention used to measure a character's progress towards their next level of potency or significant improvement in their effectiveness.

**HP: **Hit Points. A number measuring an entity's remaining life within a game.

**HUD: **Heads Up Display. An image overlaid in one's vision (or, originally, on a vehicle windscreen) that displays important information.

******Mob:** A computer-controlled enemy or linked group of enemies (called an _encounter_).

******NPC:** Non-Player Character. An entity controlled by the computer in a game that is typically not hostile. Hostile NPCs are usually described as _mobs_ instead.

******Spawn:** As a verb, the act of an entity (re)appearing or otherwise coming into existence in a location within a game or virtual world.

**Tank:** A type of character role in an online game that protects the party, focusing on keeping the attention of enemies by soaking up the majority of attacks while other characters focus on doing damage.

**Tether:** To break combat with a mob by moving out of a set area or distance beyond which the mob will not pursue.

**VR: **Virtual Reality.

**10-21-2012: **Added terms and jargon definitions.


	4. World Event

As the day marched on, Camilla and I worked our way deeper and deeper into the area surrounding the Starting City. Rolling grassy hills gradually flattened out to fields and pasture, and those in turn yielded to the encroaching forest that we'd been able to see since we first left the city. Each of us had gained three levels and a fair amount of col—the currency used in this world—as well as a small number of item drops, most of which looked like vendor trash worth a handful of col.

The only drop worth mentioning had been a steel buckler with the unlikely title of _Matron's Defender_, which had dropped from a named lioness mob that was easily one of the hardest fights we'd had yet: Camilla's HP had actually gone into the red zone just before she landed the killing blow. We were feeling pretty good about not having died yet, and it had been a relief not to break that streak. The shield boosted Camilla's STR by a few points and was a significant upgrade to her defense as well.

The world was so immersive that it felt like we'd been at this all night, but when we looked at our menus we saw that only a little over four hours had passed; it was just after five. Our avatars had been drinking water and eating the nasty black bread I bought, so we didn't _feel_ hungry or thirsty—but we knew our real bodies had to be feeling a bit hollow, and that was going to be a nasty surprise when we logged out if we didn't do something about it.

"Break?" I asked as we defeated some kind of plant-like creature called a Lesser Nepent, briefly littering the air with a shower of green.

"Break," Camilla answered, sheathing her sword and joining me as I turned to head back towards the path. "Bet you anything that Nyanko is sleeping on my chest." That was my wife's cat, a little ball of calico fur that would wait for any available human surface to present itself—so that she could take a nap on it. Woe befall anyone who dislodged her before she was ready.

"Can't blame her," I said flippantly. I looked around at the wide dirt path, which was scarred with wagon ruts. "This should be a safe place to break for a bit. It looks like there's supposed to be NPC traffic through here." I traced the gesture that opened my system menu, and frowned as I scrolled down. "Uh, Cami?"

"Hm?"

"I think my menu's horked; I've got no logout option. Can you log out and disconnect me?"

My wife snorted. "Sure, give me a sec." She made the same motions, and swore. "Lame. Mine is too."

I grinned. "That's a hell of a bug. I guess we get to play the beta after all."

"Someone should report it, though."

I nodded, starting to navigate to the _Call GM_ button. Before I could press it, I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye, and just barely recognized the sight of a dagger spinning unevenly end over end before the pommel cracked me in the head. There was no pain, and I barely took any damage from it; the dagger fell to the ground beside me.

As we both whirled and drew our weapons, a youth with bright white anime hair sticking out in spikes emerged from the treeline, looking annoyed. Above his obnoxious hair was the orange cursor that I'd read meant he'd committed a crime. He was wearing a plate cuirass with a handful of leather armor pieces strapped to his arms and legs, and as he faced us he drew a wicked-looking steel mace, slapping the head into the palm of his hand.

I guessed that he'd been expecting to hit me with a throwing dagger attack and take me out of the picture before jumping Camilla, because I'd ineffectively tried the same attack earlier against a mob—and found that I would actually need to spend quite a while leveling up my One-Handed Dagger skill before I could get any real techniques for throwing a dagger. I stood over his fallen weapon so that he'd have to come at me to get it back.

"Fucking griefers," Camilla snarled as she brandished her sword and shield before her. "You couldn't wait even one day to start PKing?" My hatred of PKers was second only to hers. Neither of us had any tolerance whatsoever for people who got their yuks by ruining the fun of other players.

"Oh, stuff a sock in it, sister. You knew that anywhere outside of town was fair game. Give me that nice shield of yours and you can walk out—"

His monologuing was cut short by Camilla dashing towards him, crossing the distance separating them and stopping just short of where he stood. She ducked under his wild swing and drove the edge of her shield into his midsection, sending him flying back into a tree trunk. A small portion of his HP gauge ticked down.

"There, I gave it to you. Like it?" She stood over him with her sword held at ready.

The boy growled in anger, rolled to one side and leapt inside her guard, tackling her. As they both went to the ground, I rushed in and tried to find an opening to use a dagger skill on him.

Despite the blows they rained on each other, they were doing no real damage. At last they broke apart and scrambled to their feet, picking up their weapons and facing each other down across the trampled dirt. "Okay brat, let's do this," my wife said, a nasty smile on her face. "I love wiping the floor with PKers."

"That makes you a PKer too, lady," the kid said, grinning as he parried her sword attack.

"Oh, _now_ you're getting _nasty_," she shot back, tucking her shoulder and knocking him back with a bunt from her shield. As the would-be griefer staggered, off-balance, I activated my dagger technique and lunged in to stab under his guard. His HP gauge crossed the halfway point and turned yellow.

"Bitch!" I wasn't sure if he was talking to me or to Camilla, and I didn't really care. What I did care about was the uppercut he dealt to me with his mace, which sent me flying into the air and took off a good third of my HP. He crouched, his mace glowing as he prepared a follow-up attack, but was interrupted by Camilla's Horizontal technique slashing across his body. Frustration filled his eyes as his HP bar dipped into the red zone; right about now he was probably realizing he'd underestimated us and bitten off more than he could chew.

With a scream of rage, he tried to activate his technique again—this time to punish Camilla, who was locked in the recovery animation of her technique. Distantly, from the direction of the Starting City, a bell began to toll; I'd seen a big one somewhere in the courtyard.

"Ask not for whom the bell tolls," I said smugly, activating my dagger technique, which was much faster to execute than his mace technique. As the system assist carried me rapidly towards him I experimented with trying to control the trajectory, aiming the dagger low and plunging it into his gut just under the cuirass.

The last of his HP vanished, and I was close enough to see his eyes widen in the knowledge that he'd been defeated, mouth forming an "O". I decided to pile on the humiliation, and as his avatar began to shatter, I whispered in his ear, "It tolls for you, asshole. Fail harder."

With the defeat of our first player enemy, the _Result_ window popped up and announced our victory, giving us a sizable amount of EXP and some of the equipment he had on him. Camilla and I cheered and hugged each other. "That was beautiful," she said.

"It was. Damn griefer got what he deserved." I picked up the dagger that the PKer had thrown at me, turning towards the Starting City and the noise that was still coming from it. "Is that bell ever going to shut up?"

I think Camilla was going to say something in reply, but I didn't get a chance to hear it. In a matter of moments, we were both enveloped by a blinding blue light, and our surroundings vanished.

* * *

When the light faded, we both stood side by side in the starting area, not far from the tall black monument we'd seen earlier. Looking up at it, I noticed that the English writing on each side was a massive list of names—from the look of them, the names of players. _That's kind of a cool touch_, I thought.

We apparently weren't the only ones who were affected by the sudden forced teleport. As we stared around in surprise, the courtyard was filled with the sight and sound of players teleporting, the sound effects overlapping so much that they turned into an undifferentiated roar until they subsided. Despite the teleports being over quickly, the ambient noise level rose to an almost deafening level as what must have been every single player in the game found themselves standing here, milling around in a state of confusion.

"Cami," I ventured, leaning in so that we could hear each other, "what's going on?"

"World Event," she said confidently. "They probably had it planned for launch day from the beginning. Any minute now the King or something is going to come out and announce that the Empire of Whoozawhatsis is going to invade, and we're all going to get quests to stop it." She elbowed me in the side and grinned happily. "And _you_ wanted to wait until later."

"I stand corrected," I conceded, taking her hand in mine. "Let's see what happens."

Not everyone was taking this in stride. There was a great clamor of consternation rising from many of the players around us, and from the sound of it we hadn't been the only ones who were having trouble with their logout option. "Maybe that's it," I murmured to my wife. "A fix or announcement for the logout issue."

A reddish cast began to fall over everything, and I followed Camilla's gaze towards the sky—or rather, the flat circle of the bottom of the 2nd floor that usually simulated the look of a sky. It was changing as an expanding pattern of wide red hexagons with warning messages tiled its way across the ceiling of this floor. We both watched in awe as a viscous red liquid began seeping out of the warning messages, oozing and coalescing into the gargantuan form of something that matched the description of a GM from the beta. The monstrous red-robed figure hung suspended over the crowd, casting a deep shadow over a portion of the courtyard.

"I think you're right," she said finally, sounding a little disappointed at the prospect of there being no World Event to play through after all. "Those warning messages don't look like—"

"Shh!" I said, nudging her. The massive form had begun to speak, welcoming us to the world. The voice reverberated through the square; the voice of God. "I want to hear what he's saying."

"**My name is Kayaba Akihiko. Right now, I am the only person who can control this world."**

_Duh,_ I thought. _But that's kind of awesome—the creator himself come to GM the opening day._

"**I believe most of you by now will have discovered the fact that the _Logout_ button has disappeared from the main menu. This is not a bug; it is an intended feature of _Sword Art Online_."**

"The fuck?" Both Camilla and I exclaimed in unison. We were far from the only ones, some of whom were much more coarse than we were.

"**Until you reach to the highest level of this castle, you will be unable to logout on your own. Nor will anyone be permitted to disrupt or dismantle the Nerve Gear from the outside. Should anyone attempt this…"**

"Camilla…" I said quietly into the silence left by Kayaba's deliberate pause. She squeezed my hand once, but said nothing. I could feel a cold wave creeping over my body as it started to dawn on me that this wasn't some kind of World Event or normal occurrence.

"**Should anyone attempt this… the interface within the Nerve Gear will emit a strong electromagnetic pulse, destroying your brain and ending your life."** Kayaba's hooded avatar had no face, but I could almost imagine the smile that would have touched it if it did. The chill that had washed over me struck me anew like a dunk in ice water. I felt my legs wobble, my head swim. Distantly, somewhere in the crowd, I heard a girl scream. I felt like joining her. Somewhere nearby, I heard what sounded like the effect that played when a mob died. It was identical to the sound that occurred when I took down that griefer.

"**Specifically, disconnection from an external power source for more than ten minutes, an interruption in network connection for more than two hours, or any attempt whatsoever to unlock, dismantle, or destroy the Nerve Gear."**

Camilla's hand was still in mine, and she was trembling just as hard, her grip tightening to the point where it would've become painful if our avatars could feel pain. In the distance, I heard the sound of broken glass again.

"**Should any of these things occur, they will immediately trigger the brain destruction sequence. To avoid this occurring accidentally or through ignorance, a statement has been released to the media and authorities in the real world. Despite this, there have already been several cases where friends or family have failed to heed my warnings and tried to remove the Nerve Gear. As a consequence..."**

I thought I knew what was coming next. I thought I was ready for it.

I was wrong.

**"Regrettably, two hundred and thirteen players have already vanished from the game in this manner... and from the real world as well."**

Blackness and panic threatened to overtake me. Sensing my legs start to give way, Camilla moved to support me until I regained my balance, although she seemed none too steady herself. I could hear hundreds of voices begin to shout their defiance and disbelief.

"**Players, you need not worry about the bodies you left on the outside. As of this moment, the situation is being reported across all TV, radio, and Internet media sources, including the fact that there have been numerous deaths. The danger of anyone being foolish enough to remove your Nerve Gear has already all but disappeared. Using the two hour grace period I have provided, all of you will be transported to health care facilities where your bodies will be sustained as long as necessary."**

The madman paused ever so slightly, and went on in a tone that managed smugness and a kind of mock reassurance all at once.

"**So relax... and focus on beating the game."**

"This is bullshit," I said to no one in particular, knowing somewhere deep inside that it wasn't.

"If he's trying to screw with us," Camilla said in much the same tone, "it's working."

**"But understand this:" ** Kayaba droned. **"**_**Sword Art Online**_** is no longer merely a game... it is your reality. From this moment on, there will be no resurrection or respawning. The moment your HP reaches zero, your avatar will vanish forever. When that happens... the Nerve Gear will destroy your brain."**

On hearing that, the tapestry of my mind began to unravel. I thought of all the close calls we'd had in the last four and a half hours. Had our lives been on the line? Then another thought occurred to me: the PKer that we killed just before we all teleported here… did he die for real? Did we murder a dumb kid whose only real crime was being a jerk on the Internet?

Would he have been responsible for _our_ murders if we'd lost?

It was too much to process. I heard Kayaba saying something else, something about clearing the game and then a gift, but the words passed over me like a wall of white noise. I let go of Camilla's hand and pressed my palms to my head, willing it to stop.

Too much. It was too much. I felt an abnormal sensation, like my body was changing in ways that I didn't have any way to name, and a blue light much like the teleport effect surrounded me. Dimly, I realize that Kayaba had stopped speaking and that the red hue that coated everything was receding. There was a sudden terrible silence, broken only by the sound of a child sobbing and an occasional muttered expletive.

Into that silence, a girl screamed.

Then, as if that cry of terror and disbelief had unleashed something bubbling just under the surface within the crowd of nearly ten thousand imprisoned players, pandemonium erupted.

* * *

**Terms and Gamer Jargon:**

**GM: **Game Master. In offline tabletop RPGs, a person who guides or tells the story and arbitrates its outcomes. In online RPGs, more commonly refers to staff with administrative powers who help to resolve problems or run in-game events.

**Griefer:** In an online game, a player who derives their enjoyment from disrupting the gameplay of others, usually by attacking them but sometimes also by exploiting the game mechanics to annoy or hinder them.

**PK:** Player Killing or Player Killer. As a verb, means for one player character in an online game to kill another. As a noun, refers to someone who does so. Not necessarily synonymous with _griefer_; many players of online games enjoy the risk of being attacked and the thrill of PVP (P_layer Versus Player_) combat.

**Vendor:** used as a noun, refers to an NPC that buys, sells or trades items with players. Used as a verb, refers to the act of selling off unwanted items (_vendor trash_) to a vendor to make money.

**World Event:** An event that affects an entire game world or server in an online game, usually planned in advance, run by the system and/or one or more GMs and intended to draw in participation from the entire player base.


	5. Unravel

Trapped. Imprisoned. Hostage to the god complex of a mad genius who had decided that it wasn't enough to simply _play_ a game. He'd created a glorious maze for his rats to navigate, and at each dead end was one flavor or another of death. And the only way out was to do something that none of the beta testers had come a tenth of the way towards doing in the entire time they played.

I was still reeling from these revelations, trying not to believe them. With glassy eyes I stared up at where Kayaba's GM form had been just seconds ago, the chaos all around me muted and hollow somehow, the edges of my world fuzzy. I was dimly aware of someone calling my name, and I turned to look for the voice with a painful slowness. A player, running headlong and screaming, slammed into me and knocked us both to the ground. I caught their eyes as I sat up, and saw the madness of a trapped animal. I recognized myself in that look.

As they scrambled to their feet, a young girl in pigtails kicked the shins of a man who had seized her arm. A distant part of me wondered if she was his daughter; she was much too young to be playing this game alone.

I could feel someone grabbing my shoulder and shaking it as I sat there on the ground, but all it did was cause my head to wobble feebly on my shoulders, as if I was half asleep and couldn't muster the strength to hold it still. And then she was there—Camilla was crouching in front of me, and something was subtly different about her, but I couldn't place it.

She was saying something; her lips were moving but no sound reached my ears. And then she leaned closer, her face inches from mine, and I realized the reason I couldn't hear her was because of the screaming and yelling of almost ten thousand terrified and angry people packed into this massive circular courtyard.

"Kadyn. Kadyn! Kadyn!"

I tried to look up at her, but my head rose slowly as if on rusty hinges. I tried to ask her a question; my mouth opened but words wouldn't come.

"Seiji!" This time it was almost a scream. The use of my real name, here in the game, seized my attention and loosened my tongue from its prison.

"Rebecca," I said, the quiet word lost in the din.

"Seiji, look at me. Damnit, _look at me!_" She held my head in her hands, palms on my cheeks, and forced me to stare her straight in the eye. I saw in her the same terror I felt, the same desperation—but controlled. A woman tried to dodge around us as she ran and went tumbling to the ground as she lost her footing, vanishing into the stampeding crowd.

"Seiji, _please. _Hear me. You and I have been clearing games together for what, twelve years now?"

"Eleven and a half," I whispered with someone else's voice.

"This is just another MMO. We can do this. Just treat it like hardcore mode, where your character is deleted after one death."

"'Character'?" I repeated, jaw slack. "It's _us_. The character dies, we die."

"So we don't take any unnecessary risks. We play it safe, and we grind until we can survive." I could feel a part of myself resurfacing with each word she spoke, the voice that was the most familiar and beloved to me in all the world driving away the gibbering terror as if it were a healing potion.

"We can _do_ this," my wife repeated fiercely, her forehead pressed against mine and her palms hot against my cheeks. I could see tears running down her cheeks as she pleaded with me, talked me back from the abyss. When she opened her eyes they were wet and red, and with a sense of detachment it occurred to me that what was different about her was that her freckles had returned. When did that happen?

"We can do this," she repeated, almost too quietly to be heard over the insanity surrounding us. Her voice broke as she went on. "But I can't do it without you. Please come back to me, Kadyn. I need you here now."

Breathe. It's the simplest thing to do; we do it from birth. But what happens when the part of your mind that governs your breathing is cut off from you? I tried to breathe, even though our avatars had no lungs and didn't need oxygen, and forced myself to take one breath at a time in order to focus myself.

"Please," Camilla whispered as she embraced me, her cheek against mine and her voice in my ear. "Please. We can do this. But only if we do it together."

At last I took one breath that was deeper than all the others, held it, and let it out slowly. Licking dry lips, I drew back and looked at the woman that I wouldn't deserve if I spent my entire life aspiring to that end. Forcing down the panic and howling hysteria, I nodded. "Okay," I said. "Okay."

I looked up at what the scene around us had become. There was still screaming and yelling, but not as much as before; more than half of the players who'd been here in the courtyard had fled to elsewhere in the city. Here and there knots of people were fighting, purple flashes of light flaring up whenever they struck each other with fists or weapons, but since we were in the "Safe Zone" here in the city limits, no HP was lost. I almost laughed at the thought. "Safe Zone". Was there any such thing anymore in this Death Game?

"Come on," Camilla said, relief flooding her face as she saw me return from the land of the Forest Elves. She took my hand in hers and helped me stagger to my feet. "Let's find an inn while there are still any rooms to be had."

* * *

The door closed behind Camilla as she returned to the inn room with a pair of steaming mugs, shutting out the shrill noise of loud arguments in the common room below. I'd already activated the fireplace and was adjusting the setting on its pop-up window, tuning it to a moderate temperature that radiated from glowing embers with a few flickering flames and an occasional pop of sparks. It wasn't that the inn room was cold, though it was a little—it was more for the psychological comfort of a fireplace. They weren't common in Japan; fear of uncontrolled fires permeated our culture deeply. But there had been one at my grandfather's cabin in Hokkaido, and I remembered the sense of security I'd felt sitting in front of it as the snow fell outside.

I glanced out the room's single window. There was no snow here in Aincrad, at least not that we'd seen in the few hours we'd been here yet. But the fireplace radiated convincing warmth, and it was comforting all the same.

My wife set the mugs on the small, low table by which I sat, and I smelled hot chocolate. Sitting behind me, she wrapped her arms around mine and linked her hands in front of my chest. "Better now?" she asked, her chin on my shoulder.

"A bit," I admitted, reaching up to cover her hands with one of mine as I stirred the hot chocolate with the other. "Where'd you get this?"

"The NPC innkeeper downstairs, of course. Nobody's had time to level up their Cooking skill yet. Try it; it's not bad."

I did, and it wasn't. It tasted like the kind of cocoa you'd get out of a powdered mix, but it was exactly what I needed right now. As I sipped at it, Camilla detached herself from me and blew on hers. She lifted it to her lips, but when she felt the heat rising from it she didn't even try to sip, just set it back down on the table.

This brought out the first smile my face had borne in hours. "_Kono nekojita_," I said, teasing her gently about her "cat tongue"—her inability to tolerate hot drinks at temperatures most Japanese found comfortable.

That, in turn, brought out an answering smile from her. "So you do still have a smile. I'd wondered if you'd scared it away."

"Almost," I replied, downing half of my drink in one go. "You know, you could probably drink that. Our avatars don't seem to feel pain."

Camilla blinked at me, as if the implications of the differences between this world and the real one hadn't extended that far for her. Cautiously, she lifted the hot chocolate to her lips, blew on it once, and tried it, tensing up. Her eyes widened, and she drank deeply. Wiping her lips, she put on a wry, lopsided smile. "Well, I guess this world has a few things going for it."

I nodded wordlessly, staring into the fireplace. If I stuck my hand in it, would it burn? Would I lose HP? _Probably not_, I decided; it seemed to be impossible to take damage within the Safe Zone.

Still, I didn't try it. My eyes drifted up to the upper left corner of my field of view, where my HP gauge glowed in my peripheral vision. I closed my eyes, and could still see it there. My name, a green bar, and the few hundred points that were all that stood between me and brain death.

"Alright," I said, opening my eyes and rotating where I sat, cross-legged, until I faced my wife. "Let's talk strategy."

"Let's," she echoed, finishing her hot chocolate. "For starters, I think it goes without saying that we don't take any unnecessary risks. We were playing on a razor's edge earlier today, and nearly wiped more than once. That named fight in particular… we can't do anything like that anymore. Not until we've leveled up a lot and have a better grasp on the limitations and rules of the system."

"The named," I murmured, a thought I'd had earlier returning to haunt me. "You almost died there. Could that have really killed you?"

Camilla gave it a few seconds of thought, taking my empty mug from me and setting it on the table beside hers. She shifted her weight around on the plush rug of the inn room, trying to get comfortable as she held her palms out to the fireplace. "I don't _think_ so," she said finally. "Kayaba…" When she said his name, she almost spat it. "Kayaba said something like _from this moment on_ when was talking about there being no respawns. At least, I _think_ that's what he said."

She had to be rattled if she was questioning her grasp of something said in Japanese. The woman I knew would never have doubted her grasp of a fundamentally simple word like _kongo_. "That's what he said," I confirmed, and as soon as I said it I realized that she was right—my earlier worries had been groundless. "I was thinking about the kid."

"The griefer?" Camilla asked in surprise. And then her eyes and mouth went wide in shock, as if the possible implications hadn't occurred to her. She clapped a hand to her mouth, still reeling at the thought. "Oh my God."

"Yeah. That's what I thought too. It was tearing me up, that we might've actually _killed_ that dumb kid. But the more I think about it, the more I'm sure that he's still alive. I don't think Kayaba would've risked allowing real deaths before he was ready to send out his press release."

Camilla drew her legs up against her chest, chin on her knees. Her long red hair, a match for the color of the embers in the fireplace, spilled down either side of her legs. "I wonder what they're going to do now."

"Who?"

Her eyes darted sideways to meet mine. "PVPers. Griefers. You think they'll still PK if they know that it amounts to murder?"

"I think that depends a lot on whether or not they really believe that it does." I hesitated before admitting, "I'm still not completely sure I believe it myself."

"Believe it," Camilla said with sudden ferocity. "Believe it in your heart, in your bones, with no room for doubt or second-guessing."

Taken aback by her tone, I raised my eyebrows in a question at her. She dropped her eyes to the floor as she thought about her answer.

"Think about it carefully, Kadyn. Ten thousand people can't log out of the game. Most of them have families; husbands or wives, sons or daughters, parents. Some of them have to go back to work or school tomorrow, some didn't come down for dinner when they were expected. Thousands, easily." When her eyes rose again, they had a haunted quality to them. "If their loved ones could take off the Nerve Gear without consequence, if tampering with them didn't truly mean death… would we all still be here?"

I had no answer. Every word rang with the empty reassurance of absolute truth.

"But let's say that there's a chance Kayaba was lying or mistaken," she went on. "Let's say we're not sure. We still have to play as if our lives depend on it. Because the moment we let our convictions slip, the moment we go into battle without being absolutely committed to coming out alive and victorious, in that order… at that point, we're gambling with our lives."

I nodded along as she spoke, confirming my agreement and understanding with each point. "We need to find an information broker, preferably a beta tester. Someone who can tell us where the safest and most effective places to grind are at our level. That information will be worth whatever we pay for it."

"A good idea," Camilla agreed. "One you can bet at least half the player base has thought of."

"Do you think we should get started tonight, then? I'll guarantee you the fields outside of town are going to be picked clean by morning. People will be fighting over boar repops before tomorrow is out."

As the fireplace crackled in the perpetual state of banked embers that I'd programmed into it, maintaining the only light in the room other than what spilled in through the window, Camilla looked like she was seriously considering the idea. I hadn't been kidding about the fields and the boars; by the time we woke up you wouldn't be able to find a good hunting spot anywhere within an hour's walk.

Finally, though, she shook her head, coming over to sit behind me again and wrapping her arms around me. "No. It's been a horrible, traumatic day and both of us have nerves frayed to the breaking point. We'll be in a much better—and safer—frame of mind for combat after a good night's rest."

I leaned back against the woman I loved, resting my head on her shoulder. "I don't know what I would've done out there today without you. I just…" I searched for words, struggling to find something eloquent enough to describe my state of mind before settling on: "I broke."

"A lot of people did, Kadyn."

"_You_ didn't."

I felt her chuckle silently, her chest shuddering against my back. "Yes I did. I just stuffed it back inside and decided to freak out later."

Silence stretched on for an indeterminate time, seconds ticking away with the intermittent pops from the fake virtual fireplace. There didn't seem to be any more need for words, nothing more to be said about the awful events of the day and how each of us were coping with them. For now we were alone, together and alive… and that was enough.

I drifted in and out of drowsiness as I lay there, my back against the softness of her chest, trapped between her warmth and the warmth of the fire. Finally I broke the silence. Without opening my eyes, I asked, "so what now?"

"Now…" She stretched the word out as if savoring it before replying. "I think for now what I need more than anything is to hold you and be held."

By wordless agreement we shifted position, lying back on the rug together with our arms and bodies entwined and occasionally venturing a kiss or a stroke of the other's hair. There was a moment of awkwardness when we realized we couldn't simply take our clothes off; they weren't objects that could simply be pulled off over a person's head or legs. We giggled like schoolchildren as we opened our respective system menus and unequipped everything piece by piece, until all that remained were the minimal undergarments enforced by the system's Ethics Code.

SAO was a stunningly realistic simulation of a living world with living bodies in it, but it was still _different_ in a thousand little ways that defied description—from the way the sensation of gravity acted upon our senses of equilibrium, to the very tactile feel of another person's skin. Kayaba's final "gift" to the players of Aincrad had been to revert us all to appearances that were nearly perfect reproductions of our real selves, but they weren't _completely_ perfect. To Camilla and I, who each knew the other's body almost as well as our own, it was like exploring and learning each other all over again.

By the time we got to where we needed to toggle off the Ethics Code that discouraged players from using the game for activities it had never been intended to simulate, we'd decided that perhaps hot chocolate and a lack of pain weren't the only silver linings in this world.

* * *

**Terms and Gamer Jargon:**

**Grind: **To repetitively kill mobs or do quests with the specific goal of quickly earning experience points and leveling up.

**Repop/Respawn**: Refers to the spawning of a mob which previously existed in a given location but which was killed or removed. Most generic mobs have a respawn cycle that will regenerate them after a set period of time passes.

**10-21-2012:** Added terms and jargon definitions.


	6. A New Day

According to the technical literature, the Nerve Gear induced a state much like REM sleep when you're in a full dive. I'm no neurologist, but there's some sort of natural chemical or signal that shuts down the communication between the parts of the brain that govern voluntary muscle control and the rest of the nervous system. That's part of why we don't go running into walls when we're running in a dream, and when this doesn't work correctly you get people who sleepwalk or thrash in their sleep.

Fortunately, Rebecca and I have always been sound sleepers. We tend to wake up in much the same position we were in when we drifted off, and my dreams are deep and vivid even if I can't remember them in the morning.

That night, I dreamed of player killing.

In the manner of dreams, I replayed the fight between us and the griefer kid a hundred times, with the outcome a little different each time. Sometimes we still won, sometimes he took out one of us before the other did for him in a fit of rage, and as often we came out on the losing end. They blurred into each other, looping over and over again like a bad Monday that would never end.

Much of the time, the player who died never respawned. Kayaba had lied; death had been a permanent consequence from the moment we strapped on the helmets and logged in.

As the dream went on, the boundaries between real and not frayed and dissolved. It was no longer clear to me which was the dream: Aincrad, or the real world. In some of the sequences, the griefer and I had switched places. I was the PKer, and the kid fought at Camilla's side.

In one such sequence, the kid was even fighting at _my_ side as we cooperated to take down the tank who'd strayed into the woods alone. He pressed the attack with his mace, holding Camilla's attention while I flanked her. I felt a moment of simultaneous horror and satisfaction as I landed the killing blow and she shattered, never to return. As the PK kid laughed and slapped me on the back to congratulate me, I closed my eyes to block out the scene.

And opened them in a different place.

Rebecca and I were home. We were sleeping in a position that was deeply familiar and comfortable to us: she flat on her back with her legs slightly bent and knees arched, my cheek pillowed on her breast while I lay semi-fetal on my side with an arm thrown over her midsection, my legs curled under hers. The light of early morning was filtering through the window, the grid of the muntins throwing a cross-shaped shadow across her freckled chest.

As the dream receded, I let my eyes drift closed again and smiled happily, banishing the unease and sense of wrongness that still lingered and savoring the feel of her closeness and warmth. I turned my head ever so slightly and kissed the skin that I found there, drawing a soft sound of sleepy contentment from my wife. The arm that she had around me tightened a little, and I lifted my chin to look up at her face through half-lidded eyes, seeking the smile I knew I would find there.

Then I froze. As I focused on her, I saw a green ribbon appear in the air, arcing around the left side of her head: her HP bar.

"Oh, _hell_," I said softly, sitting up a little as the hundreds of little details that were wrong about this scene all impacted my awareness at once. This wasn't our room at home—for one thing, it was far too neat, and there were no cats; Nyanko at least would have almost certainly been on my wife's belly below my arm. I couldn't feel the rise and fall of her chest beneath my head; she wasn't breathing and didn't need to. Even her skin felt subtly different: it was too smooth and perfect, and there were no body hairs except for on her head.

At the sound of my voice, Camilla's eyes drifted open, looking down at me and smiling. Then I felt her stiffen briefly as the smile left her face, her gaze going to the left side of my head. "Not a dream?" she asked.

"Not a dream," I confirmed sadly, knowing that she was referring to the fact that we truly were trapped in this Death Game.

Camilla closed her eyes and let her head fall back to the pillow. "Shit," she said.

"I know," I replied, laying my head back down on her chest as the previous day flooded back to me in bits and pieces. "Pretty soon we're going to need to get up and go look for a hunting spot."

"Ugh, can't we stay like this for a while longer? This is nice and I really don't want to think about what's waiting out there for us."

I breathed out a quiet laugh. I might be the daydreamer, but she was _not_ a morning person. I planted a line of kisses on her chest that led up to her chin, and looked down at her. "Come on, love. We got our night's sleep, but if we don't get out there soon we're going to be praying for a boar to pop and begging in the streets for EXP."

"Keep that up and we're not going anywhere."

I sat up the rest of the way and swung my legs over the side of the bed, indulging in a magnificent stretch. A pair of arms encircled my waist from behind and threatened to drag me back down. "Rebecca," I said, not quite sternly.

"All right, all right," she grumbled. "But if they don't have coffee in this world, I may PK someone."

It would've been a horrible joke if we didn't know exactly how each other felt about player killers in the real world—let alone in this one where it was just another way of saying "murderer". We both set about equipping our gear, and laughed at the strangeness of it all as we did.

"I'll say one thing," she said as the steel cuirass that she'd gotten from the griefer kid's drops materialized on her torso. Despite the differences in their body types, it seemed to conform to the shape and measurements of whoever equipped it automatically. "This whole equipment menu thing beats the hell out of getting dressed for work. And _no underwire bras_. Halle-fuckin-lujah." The last phrase was in English; I knew what it meant but wasn't sure I could've properly translated it if I tried.

I had less to equip than she did, so while Camilla was still mulling over her armor options, I scrolled through the item list and looked for the dagger the griefer kid had thrown at me. As I did, I saw the name of a pair of steelthread boots go gray in the item list, and at almost the same time they appeared on Camilla's feet. "Oh, hey, check this out. It looks like the marriage code doesn't let us see each other's inventories; it merges them into one single bucket."

"Really?" Camilla asked as she tapped the air in front of her, toggling indecisively between two different swords. I watched in fascination as they disappeared and rematerialized in their sheaths at her side. "That's convenient. It'll save us from having to give each other stuff all the time. Is our money shared too?"

"Doesn't look like," I said. "I didn't lose any when you went down and bought the hot chocolate last night."

"Oh well."

I nodded as I found the item I'd been looking for. "The dagger that kid threw is an upgrade for me. A little more damage, and gives me +3 to Agility. Nice."

Camilla seemed to finally decide on a sword, equipping one with an ornate jeweled hilt and a scabbard lined with traceries of knotwork in blue thread. She slid it out and examined the blade. "Nice," she answered. "Isn't it great when your enemies give you presents?"

I grinned at her. "'What is best in life?'" I asked, deepening my voice theatrically.

She saluted me with her long sword, and growled out, "'To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.'"

It was yet another old joke between us, a quote from a movie that was ancient long before we were born. We laughed together as she returned the sword to its scabbard. "Come on," I said, throwing an arm around her shoulder. "Let's go vendor the rest of this crap and crush some enemies."

* * *

With less than a day in the game under our belts, it was hard to be sure what the economy was going to be like and how much each _col_—the game's unit of currency—was going to be worth. In some games, gold was common and you'd spend a bit of it even on your starting equipment. In others, copper was the default unit and silver or gold were something you had to work up to. Almost universally, platinum—or "plat" as it was often called—was a high-end currency used for buying high-end gear or housing. In Aincrad there only seemed to be the one type so far, and between the money from our kills and what we got for vendoring all the trash that had dropped the previous day we had a couple thousand col burning a hole in our inventories.

Was that a lot? Maybe it was, at level 4. Maybe not. But it was enough to get us some health potions (which would heal slowly over time, but much more quickly than the default health regen that only worked when we weren't in combat anyway), a pair of antidote potions, and one incredibly precious and expensive healing crystal that would instantly restore one of us to full health. We resolved to avoid making it necessary to use it if at all possible, but it was nice to have it there just in case.

That raised an interesting line of thought that I mulled over as we walked. This wasn't going to be any normal game economy, not with the lives of every single player on the line. People were going to be hoarding anything that might give them an advantage, and quality loot was going to fetch premium prices. Healing items in particular were going to be insanely expensive; the crystal that we'd bought was the only thing we'd gotten from another player rather than an NPC, and it had cost us almost a thousand col by itself. That was probably highway robbery, but we were willing to pay it because it could literally be the difference between life and death. We wouldn't be the only ones thinking that way, and it would drive up the market prices of recovery items.

By the time we were done, our cash reserves were almost completely wiped out, but we felt a lot more comfortable with the idea of leaving the city. We had food and drink, we had recovery items, and we were much better-equipped than we had been on launch day just from the drops that we'd gotten.

The question now was where to go.

Camilla and I sat together on a bench in the central plaza, eating that awful cheap bread that only cost a couple of col and reading the free game guide we'd found at one of the item shops. It was full of a wealth of information that was purportedly collected from beta testers; I gave silent thanks to whoever they were and promised myself that if the opportunity ever arose I'd consider it a debt to be repaid.

"Says here that there's a town not far from where we were in the forest yesterday," Camilla said around a mouthful of bread.

"I saw that," I replied, leaning over and looking to see where she was at in the manual. "Apparently we were lucky; some of the mobs around there are pretty dangerous. Good quests, though."

"It might not be a bad idea to relocate away from the Starting City. We can always go back for supplies if we need to, but most people are going to be sticking close to the city and hunting the surrounding area bone-dry. We'll have an advantage if we don't have to walk for hours to get to a fresh zone every day."

"The mobs on the other side of Horunka are quite a bit higher-level than we are," I pointed out. "And it's not a Safe Zone—we'd be vulnerable to PKers."

Camilla sighed, leaning back on the bench until her head touched the shrubbery behind us. "I know," she said. "But while we shouldn't take unnecessary risks, we have to take _some_ if we want to level up. Setting a single foot outside of the city is a risk. Pulling any mob is a risk. Even staying here is a risk."

"Is it?" I asked. "I thought we were safe here. I mean…" It was hard to say what came next. I wasn't even really sure I wanted to say it. But it had to be said nonetheless. "We could stay here. Even with what little equipment and levels we've gained so far, none of the mobs right outside the city would be any real threat to us unless we were careless, and we won't be. We could make a living killing one or two a day for food and lodging money."

"Would you really be happy doing that?" Camilla made the kind of face that she normally only used when she smelled nattou, and threw what was left of her bread on the ground. It shimmered briefly, and then shattered with the same burst of polygons as a dying monster. "Could you sit here in the city, eating this shitty bread and hoping that one day someone gets us out of here, living day to day for the pleasure of finding a boar that someone else hasn't pulled yet? What kind of existence would that be?"

"A dismal one," I admitted. "But it's an option. We'd be alive and together."

My wife leaned against me, our arms slipping around each other. "Kadyn, you know I love you. Never doubt that. Wherever we end up in this world, we'll go there together. But I can't just stay here in this city and kill trash mobs for bread money for the rest of my days. I'll go mental."

I squeezed her shoulder, acknowledging that we'd considered and rejected the notion of holing up in the Starting City. "Besides," she went on. "There's no guarantee that this city will remain a Safe Zone forever. There could be some kind of World Event that turns off the code that protects us from harm in the city."

"Or," I put in suddenly as an unpleasant thought crossed my mind, "there could be ways to kill people even in the city." I'd played plenty of stealthy and assassin-type characters over the years, and used my share of exploits and every sneaky trick in the book to bring down PKers. It occurred to me that it would be foolish to be sanguine about the safety of the Starting City.

"Yup. So let's plan on looking for an inn in Horunka tonight, or elsewhere if we get further than that. We're paid up in our inn room here for the next two days, so we'll come back if we have to—but let's not if we can avoid it."

As we stood, I looked around at the massive cobblestone courtyard and up at the monolith that jutted, knifelike, out of the center of the plaza where we'd all been summoned yesterday. Camilla and I had taken a good look at it when we returned here this morning, and realized that it wasn't just a list of all the players in the game—it was a _death_ list. Over three hundred names had lines drawn through them by the system, and we'd both shivered with the realization that each of those lined names stood for a life that was extinguished forever. Someone's son or daughter or spouse, just gone. We hadn't been able to find our own names yet, and weren't sure we wanted to spend the time to look. It felt too much like looking at a headstone.

Instead, I looked around at the other players who were here. There weren't many at the moment; perhaps a few dozen at most. Most of them were gathered around the black stone monument, pointing up at it or scanning it with their eyes, looking for friends or family. A few people had somehow taken pictures of other people's smiling avatars and stuck them to the stone at chest height.

Elsewhere, there were a few couples like us, sitting on benches or strolling hand in hand with no apparent destination. If you squinted and cleared your mind, you might be able to pretend that it was a pleasant day somewhere in the real world, a park with happy couples who weren't trapped in a Death Game. All it needed for the illusion was for the air to be filled with cherry blossom petals.

_Human beings are infinitely adaptable_, I thought as Camilla and I headed towards the city gates. The proof was all around us. Here we were, imprisoned in a game where "death penalty" didn't just mean the loss of some EXP or equipment, and yet life had to go on. Thousands of others had realized the same thing we had: that this was our real world, now. Whatever happened to our bodies in the outside world was something over which we had no control. The closely packed streets of Akihabara's shopping district, the smooth acceleration of the _shinkansen_ on the way to work… we'd go mad if we spent too much time dwelling on them, and we couldn't just sit in an inn room and pine for what we'd left behind.

Life had to go on. And for now… life was Aincrad.

* * *

**Terms and Gamer Jargon:**

**Loot**: Items dropped by defeated enemies. Can also be used as a verb, meaning to take whatever loot was dropped by a defeated foe.

**10-21-2012:** Added jargon footnote.

**Review reply to EnigmaticVagabond:** Thank you! We've discussed some of this of course in PM, but I wanted to acknowledge here what you said about "showing" rather than "telling". Unfortunately a certain degree of that is unavoidable here without expanding this into novel length and risking never finishing it. As you say, the fact that the narration is in first person excuses it somewhat-as, I think, does the fact that Kadyn by his own admission spends a lot of time off in his own thoughts.


	7. Confrontation

"_Honma kai?"_ the man uttered in bewilderment, laughing hysterically and holding his sides as if they hurt. There are many ways that phrase could be translated into English. _Are you shitting me?_ was how it came across in the current situation.

The current situation was that Camilla and I had tentatively decided to party up with a trio of players who were hunting later that evening on the far side of Horunka, a town that was perhaps a few hours' walk from the Starting City. They were a curious collection of characters: a massive bald man with skin the color of milk chocolate and a heavy two-handed war axe, a quiet blond boy in his early to mid teens with a one-handed war hammer and a worn-looking wooden shield, and a surly young swordsman with short spiky orange hair and an absolutely outrageous Kansai accent who seemed to take great relish in living up to his own stereotype.

The latter of the three—who we'd learned was named Kibaou—was the one who'd reacted this way to Camilla's introduction the first time she spoke, and was trying none too hard to keep from laughing himself sick. The black man, Agil, looked as if he wanted to intervene but remained silent with his lips set in a thin line. The blond kid simply stood in the background with his arms crossed, a haunted look in his eyes.

My wife, on the other hand, was standing beside me with an expression of barely restrained rage. Her cheeks were nearly as red as her hair, and her fists clenched and unclenched at her sides.

"This _gaijin_ chick," the spiky-haired man said, still fighting off fits of laughter, "has gotta be the funniest thing I ever heard. Say it again, hon. Say 'nice to meet ya' like you did before, I want to hear it again."

My eyes narrowed dangerously, and I started to take a step forward. Rather than indulge Kibaou's request, she spat out an anatomically and temporally impossible suggestion that made my ears burn. Kibaou reacted as if he thought this was hilarious too.

Camilla did not, in the strictest sense, speak any of the various Kansai dialects—certainly not natively. We'd been living together in my hometown of Chiba for most of the last ten years, and the Japanese she learned in high school had been the same _hyoujungo_—that is, "standard" Japanese—that we speak at home. But her high school teacher had been a middle-aged man who grew up just outside of Osaka, and while he always took care to teach his students textbook_ hyoujungo_, in casual conversation he would slip back into his home dialect, and even in the classroom it was difficult to completely eliminate all traces of an accent.

My wife was a voracious learner with a real passion for the language, and had been his favorite student. As a result she had inadvertently absorbed a lot of her teacher's speaking cadences, speech patterns and idioms over the three years she had taken his class. A lengthening of some vowels and clipping of others, a noticeable "bounce" to the rhythm of her sentences, and certain contractions and figures of speech—things like that were an inseparable part of how she spoke, though she usually took care to speak "normally" to strangers lest she inadvertently offend someone. Camilla much preferred to offend people intentionally.

But when she was in a casual setting or her temper flared, the accent came out in force. To a Japanese person, hearing a foreigner speak our language with any fluency was in and of itself a novelty that you didn't usually see every day. A pretty American woman slurring her double consonants or (as had happened here) saying _yoroshuu tanomimangana _tended to turn heads.

Or, in the case of people who actually were from that region, occasionally resulted in hilarity at her expense.

"You know what?" Camilla snapped. "Fuck this. We don't need these guys. No offense," she said, turning to Agil and the kid whose name we hadn't gotten to learn before this outburst. "You two seem like decent folks. But I'm not partying with this retroactive abortion who mistook a sea anemone for a hairstyle."

"ENOUGH!" Up until now, Agil had been speaking in a firm but gentle voice when he spoke at all. Now he stepped in between Camilla and Kibaou, who had both advanced towards each other and been on the verge of coming to blows, holding out his palms to separate them. His roared interjection stopped everyone in their tracks as much as his imposing size, and an uncomfortable silence descended.

"There is no need for this rudeness," the giant said in calmer tones that brooked no argument. "Let's not forget who our real adversaries are. We're all here to gain levels so that we can survive in this world, is that not so? We should be working together towards that end, not picking pointless fights over trivial differences."

I decided at once that this Agil was someone who was possessed of a generous helping of the same kind of good sense that Camilla usually displayed—when she wasn't utterly furious. The situation was too tense to smile, but I nodded respectfully at his words.

"Now then," Agil said, picking his words carefully. He seemed as fluent as my wife, but carried a faint hint of what sounded like an American accent. "The monsters in this area are strong compared to us. We will all benefit from working together, but in order to do that we must be able to trust each other. Can we agree to put this behind us and behave in a civilized way?"

Scowling, Kibaou crossed his arms and glared at Camilla. She in turn gave him a smile that seemed superficially sweet and endearing, but with a look in her eyes that promised pain if she ever met him in a dark alley. I elbowed her in the arm.

Governing her temper, Camilla took a deep, calming breath and took her hand off of the hilt of her sword. "I can work with the retro—" I coughed and kicked her lightly in the boot. "—with the gentleman if he agrees to act like one."

All eyes turned to Kibaou, who grunted and nodded. Agil clapped his hands once, and said, "good! That's settled, then."

It did not escape my attention that neither of them had apologized. As I watched the looks that Kibaou and Camilla exchanged with each other while we prepared to move out, I wasn't so sure anything was settled at all.

* * *

Although tension still simmered below the surface between Camilla and Kibaou, once we started pulling mobs everyone fell into a fairly effective rhythm, with Camilla and the blond kid—whose name, we learned, was Reznor—taking primary tanking duties, Agil and Kibaou switching in to deal heavy blows at vulnerable moments, and me flanking the mobs for critical behind-the-back attacks.

Between battles and battlegrounds, Camilla and Agil struck up friendly conversation in English, both of them being originally from America before marrying a Japanese citizen. It was odd hearing her speak the language at length after so many years—she would do so on the phone with her parents, of course, and sometimes when we were watching American movies or TV shows, or in chat when playing on English-language MMOs. And occasionally we'd converse in partial or complete English sentences, especially if there were American idioms involved. But for the most part we spoke Japanese at home, and had done so even when we briefly lived together in her home city before moving here.

I could tell that neither Kibaou nor the young boy understood most of what they were saying. They hung back from the group and conversed quietly, the swordsman occasionally giving her a sullen look behind her back. My suspicions were confirmed when Reznor took me aside once in between pulls and asked me if the two Americans were talking about him.

The question surprised me—not that he'd asked me what they were saying, but that he'd assumed it was at his expense. "What makes you think they're talking about you?" I asked him.

The boy shrugged and looked away. "I dunno. But they're not including us in the conversation."

"How could they?" I replied, watching for mob respawns while we talked rather than looking at him.

"By speaking Japanese," the blond kid answered in a tone that suggested I'd asked a stupid question.

I bristled a little; something about him rubbed me the wrong way. I looked at him askance. "Have you ever lived overseas?" I asked quietly.

Reznor looked almost offended. "It's rude to ask people about the world outside."

That was news to me, but it was understandable. "How old are—" I stopped. That wasn't the question I wanted to ask, and it would get us derailed from the point I wanted to make. "Never mind. Look, if you ever do spend any amount of time living overseas, you'll understand. Sometimes you get homesick, and just want to have a conversation in your native language. For all we know they're the only two westerners trapped in this game."

Reznor turned and eyed me warily, an expression of what looked almost like suspicion on his face. I rolled my eyes and waved him off. "Forget it. All you need to know is that they're mostly just talking about how they met their spouses and where they grew up. It's nothing bad about anyone here."

"Say I don't believe you."

I shrugged. "Say I don't care what you believe." I paused, and against my better judgment decided to twist the knife. "Maybe if you paid more attention in school you'd know I was telling the truth."

It had the desired effect. Reznor glared at me and stomped off, muttering angrily to Kibaou as they paced around the perimeter of the glade we were clearing.

I sighed heavily, and wandered over to where Agil and Camilla were still talking animatedly. I didn't catch what the man said, but Camilla's eyes went as wide as saucers and she immediately burst out laughing, leaning back against a tree trunk and waving a hand in front of her face in a very Japanese gesture as I approached them.

"Oh God, Kadyn," she said as she gasped in between laughs, "you _have_ to hear this."

"Maybe later," I said, trying and failing to smile. "Listen—"

"Please accept my apologies," Agil said, his eyes twinkling with his own laughter. "I've been monopolizing your wife and excluding you, and it is terribly rude of me."

"Not at all," I said in English, waving my hand dismissively. "She is charming and it is nice for her to meet another from her home country. I understand your conversation; you are not excluding." Shifting back to Japanese, I said, "I think we've hunted this area clean. May I borrow my wife for a minute before we move on?"

"By all means," Agil said with a friendly bow.

I stuck out my elbow, and Camilla hooked hers in it as we strolled casually towards a quiet corner of the glade. "Having fun?" I asked.

"You have no idea," she replied, looking happier than she had in hours. But then a cloud passed over her face. "Agil is really nice. Poor guy though; his wife is stuck on the outside. He's afraid of what's going to happen to his business if he's trapped in here for a long time. If it goes under and leaves her without any income…"

"That's rough," I said with genuine sympathy. I then raised my eyebrows. "'Really nice'?"

Camilla raised one of hers in return. "Jealous?" she teased.

"Not especially," I replied with a smile. I was used to the way men looked at my wife; she was nice to look at. Some of them were very direct and crass about it. I didn't get that vibe from Agil; he'd been looking her in the eye as they spoke and his demeanor was non-threatening. And he'd made her laugh, which was a surefire way to get on my good side.

"Well, good," she said, seeming relieved. I wondered if she'd seriously thought I would be. We went from linked elbows to linked fingers, and I caught my wife giving me a measured look. "Was there something you wanted to talk about?"

"There was," I admitted, looking around to make sure Kibaou and Reznor were out of earshot. I switched to English just to be sure. "I don't trust them."

Both the look and the language change got her attention, and I sensed her tense up and shift into a more serious frame of mind. She didn't bother asking me who I meant. In the same language, she said, "What happened?"

"Reznor took me aside and asked me if you and Agil were talking about him. The conversation went badly from there. He and Kibaou have been talking together a lot, and I do not like where this is going."

I saw Camilla's eyes flicker quickly towards the pair, who were chatting inaudibly with Agil as they watched for repops. As I looked, I caught them glancing in our direction. "What do you want to do about it?"

I had been considering just that, and lowered my voice further before replying. "Let's tell everyone we are going back to the inn. We can send Agil a friend request if you want; I trust him. But there is something wrong with that kid, and Osaka-chan over there is an asshole."

Camilla giggled briefly at the name I used for Kibaou, and switched back to Japanese. "Okay. Let's do it."

At that moment, as we were turning back, I heard Kibaou's shout from the clearing. "Hey, you two!"

Standing in the center were the two players we'd been discussing. With a feeling of unease I noted that Agil was standing beside them, looking grim. I exchanged a glance with my wife, who gave me an almost imperceptible shrug as if to say that she had no idea what was going on.

"Is there a problem?" I asked as we drew near the three of them.

"Don't play dumb, pal," growled Kibaou menacingly. "I know about the two of you."

Camilla bristled defensively, her hand twitching as if tempted to draw her sword. "Know what? Agil, what the hell is going on?"

Agil's arms were folded before him, and he wore an expression of wary regret. "I'm truly sorry to have to confront you like this," he said gravely, sounding as if he sincerely was. "But there have been some very serious accusations made towards you and your husband. We have to clear the air before we can go on."

My wife was looking daggers at Kibaou, but my eyes went to Reznor, who wore an expression of undisguised contempt as he glared at us. "I don't know what these two told you, Agil," I began, "but we were about to head back to our inn room anyway. We have no argument with you. If you don't trust us, I'm very sorry and we will part ways with you with no hard feelings."

"Not so fast," Kibaou said, taking a step forward and shaking a fist at us. "I want to know when you were planning on doing it."

"Doing what?" Camilla and I both demanded at the same time.

Reznor put a hand on the grip of the war hammer hanging at his side, which produced an answering reaction from my wife as she loosened her sword in its scabbard with her thumb. The temperature in the clearing dropped several degrees, and I could feel the situation teetering on the edge of a knife. "PKing us," he said coldly.

* * *

**Terms and Gamer Jargon:**

**_Gaijin_:** Literally "outside person"; Japanese for "foreigner". Somewhat impolite and occasionally derogatory, depending on the context and tone. It is more polite to say _gaikokujin_.

_**Yoroshuu Tanomimangana**_**:** A Kansai dialect version of a Japanese ritual phrase (_yoroshiku onegaishimasu_) that is used similarly to the way "nice to meet you" is in English. This version of the phrase is somewhat dated and stereotypical, which is part of why it was so funny to Kibaou.

**Review reply to Truenikos: **Thank you so much for your kind words! We discussed this in PM, but for the benefit of others I'll reply here as well. As a foreigner living in Japan as part of a mixed couple, Camilla is very touchy about her Japanese fluency, doubly so because of the regional accent she absorbed from her teacher. Kibaou just happened to stomp all over her buttons and do a little dance on them.

**Review reply to Ningy0:** Thank you very much! I think you'll find as the story goes on that there is more to Kibaou's involvement in this story than to simply be the designated asshole. :) Aside from other reasons that will become clear later, I chose him for this role (rather than simply making up an OC) specifically because of the way he would play off of Camilla.


	8. Redemption

Both of our jaws were hanging open as if we were trying to catch flies. Camilla and I looked at each other in horrified disbelief. PKers? Us? The notion would've been laughable if we hadn't been in a tense standoff that could easily end with one or more people dead. The shock that she and I both felt must have been plain on our faces, because Agil stirred uneasily and looked towards Reznor.

"This is a very serious accusation," the large black man said, addressing the boy and making a placating gesture for him to take his hand off of his weapon. "And admittedly after traveling with and fighting beside them for the last several hours, I find it difficult to believe. On what do you base this?"

"Because I _saw_ them do it earlier," Reznor said angrily. "I saw them kill another player, right before we were all teleported to the plaza. And _he_ was the one who dealt the killing blow," he added as he pointed at me.

Suddenly a few of the puzzle pieces fell into place. My shoulders slumped and I raised my eyes to the sky, shaking my head in exasperation. "You little brat," Camilla seethed, "did you even bother to watch the entire fight? It was _self-defense_!"

Agil looked troubled, watching Camilla speak as if he was seeing her for the first time. Kibaou wore a triumphant look. "So you admit you PKed someone?" he demanded.

Camilla threw up her hands. "Are you as deaf as you are stupid, Osaka-chan? I just said it was self-defense. That brat was the PKer; he attacked us first!"

"Says you," Kibaou growled, hands balling into fists as Camilla spoke. "We got an eyewitness who says otherwise."

"Eye_witless_ is more like it," Camilla shot back, using English to make the pun out of the first word. I had to admit it was clever, but her temper probably wasn't improving the situation and it was doubtful her intended targets even understood the insult. I laid a hand gently on her arm. Normally she took most difficulties in stride far better than I did, but once she lost her temper it could be hard to get her to back down. And she and Kibaou had been like oil and water since they first met; I was long past the point of thinking that partying with this group had been a serious mistake.

"This is getting us nowhere!" Agil said loudly before anyone could escalate the situation further. "Reznor, are you certain of what you saw? Isn't it possible that you didn't see how the fight began, and misunderstood the situation?"

"I know what I saw," Reznor said angrily. "And she's wearing the armor she stole after they killed him; he's got the guy's dagger. Plus have you seen the way he fights? He sneaks around and backstabs everything. That's how PKers play."

"Why you little—!"

"Camilla!" I snapped finally. It was rare that I ever raised my voice to her, and it stopped her cold as she looked at me, stunned and looking a little hurt. More gently, I went on. "Please, dial it back a notch. The kid is either lying or stupid, but _this isn't helping us._"

I could see the words penetrate, watch her lips move as she counted breaths and forced her arms to her sides. When her expression finally held more outrage than rage, she turned back to Agil and gave him a deep, respectful bow. "Please accept my apologies for losing my temper, Agil. _That one_ has been insulting me since we joined this group and I let him get under my skin. And I don't know what _his_ problem is," the last accompanied by a curt nod towards Reznor. "But we are _not_ player killers. We were attacked by an orange boy who admitted that he was a PKer. We defended ourselves. And we defeated him. This all happened before anyone knew that death was for real in this game. That is the truth, and it is all there is to this."

Agil's expression softened somewhat as Camilla reined in her temper and apologized. He listened to her explanation, holding up a hand when Reznor sputtered and tried to interrupt, and then frowned with a quizzical expression as she finished speaking. "Wait. What does this mean, 'orange boy'?"

What Camilla had actually said was _orenji shounen_. Admittedly it made little sense without the context. "It means he was a criminal," I explained. "There were a few guides on the Internet with limited details on the game, and there's one at the item shop now as well. In them there is information on the crime system in Aincrad. If you commit a crime, your cursor will turn from green to orange. Depending on the seriousness of the crime and how many you've committed, it will go back to green after a period of time."

"And if someone attacks you," Camilla went on, "You can defend yourself without turning orange yourself. Even if you kill them." Neither of us had to look at the other to know that our cursors were green. Nor did we feel the need to point it out; the fact spoke for itself.

Agil looked thoughtful, rubbing the hair on his chin as he thought this over. We saw his eyes go to the air above each of our heads in turn, confirming what he'd no doubt already seen before. Kibaou was still scowling darkly at us, but with a hint of uncertainty in his eyes; Reznor's glare was murderous. I met his gaze squarely for a moment, and felt a momentary chill that had a flavor of déjà vu to it.

"Reznor," Agil said finally, "I think you should consider that perhaps you've accused these two players unjustly. If it is true that Kadyn killed another player without provocation, his cursor should be orange, should it not?"

The boy continued to glare at me sullenly. Finally he averted his eyes, looking no less angry. "Maybe," he allowed, sounding as if it was a generous concession.

"Oh for—" Camilla started angrily, and then stopped herself.

"That's enough," Agil said, holding up a hand again to forestall any further arguments. "I think we should consider disbanding, going back to the town for the night and sleeping on this. There's been enough misund—"

"POP!" my wife shouted suddenly. A column of bright blue light had appeared behind Agil, and a massive brown-furred mob reared up on its hind legs with a roar, the cursor above its head turning red as it aggroed the nearest player. Agil started to turn—far too late—as the bear slashed towards him with both claws.

Camilla had been in motion as soon as she saw the spawn effect begin to fountain from the ground. She tackled Agil at a dead run, the impact carrying him out of the path of the attack as one of the claws raked her across the back. I watched with horror as close to a third of her HP gauge disappeared from the single hit, and drew my dagger with a yell.

"Get back!" Camilla yelled, waving me off as she struggled to draw her sword and shield. "You can't block these attacks!"

That wasn't going to stop me from trying. Knowing it wasn't going to do any real damage, I threw the dagger overhand, striking the bear squarely in the face. The mob roared in outrage as I aggroed it, turning its attention away from where Camilla lay on the ground and bounding towards me with far more speed than I would've thought a creature that size capable of mustering. Having thrown away my weapon, and one with which I couldn't even block at that, I tried desperately to leap out of the way as the mob bore down on me.

_THWACK_. The claws had been scything towards me far more quickly than I could dodge, and I had winced right before they were about to strike. But when I looked up, the bear was rearing back and howling in pain, with Kibaou deflecting one of its paws and Agil the other. "Get out of here!" Agil yelled, parrying another swipe from the bear with his great axe while Kibaou leapt into the opening and executed a sword skill on the bear's exposed underbelly.

I didn't need any further urging. I scrambled out from underfoot and ran over to Camilla. Her HP bar was still around 75%, but it was climbing slowly even though we were in combat. "I'm fine," she said through clenched teeth. It couldn't be pain—more likely it was anger and frustration. "I took a potion. Get your dagger; I'll start tanking the add."

As she got to her feet and rushed in to help Agil and Kibaou, I stood up and looked around the clearing where the bear had initially spawned. My dagger had hit it right _here_; it shouldn't be far. But despite the trampled ground offering no place for it to have been lost, I couldn't see it anywhere. I pounded my fist into my leg. "The hell did my dagger go?"

"Right here," said a familiar voice behind me as the dagger plunged into my back.

I watched my HP gauge drop directly into the yellow as the critical strike bypassed my armor, my mouth opening in shock and a vast numbness spreading out from the point of impact as my assailant withdrew the weapon. I staggered, not entirely sure what was happening to me, and twisted as I fell, landing on my back and looking up at Reznor's rage-filled features and newly orange cursor. And it was then that I knew exactly why his voice had sounded familiar… and what had been bothering me about him this whole time.

"You…" I said, trying to rise to my feet. Another blow struck with a flash of light, knocking me back against a tree trunk and putting me so deep in the red that my HP gauge began flashing and sounding a warning alarm.

For a moment I thought the shattering sound that I heard was my own death. When I looked up, though, I saw the bear disappear in an explosion of green particles as Agil's axe drove its head into the ground. Reznor turned as he heard the same sound, anger turning to fear when he saw Camilla dashing towards him, covering the ground that separated them with frightening speed and an even more terrifying expression. She trailed blue light as she tucked her shoulder behind her shield and charged, screaming wordlessly at the sight of my HP bar, and struck him with such force that he tumbled head over feet for a good twenty meters before striking another tree with a sickening sound.

I fumbled with the system menu in my haste, navigating to our shared inventory and using the healing crystal. As my HP immediately shot back up to full, I looked up and saw Camilla pick up Reznor by the scruff of his shirt, pinning him to the tree with her sword and wearing an expression of murderous vengeance. The boy screamed as she did, not out of pain but out of sheer mortal terror, and began sobbing and begging as she withdrew the blade from his body.

"CAMILLA!"

For the second time in one day I raised my voice to my wife, this time in a desperate plea for her soul that froze her in place. I could see Reznor's HP gauge from where I stood, and it was as low as mine had been a moment before, flashing a color as red as my wife's face. She had him jammed up against a tree, the blade of her sword held against his neck. What had a few moments before been a would-be PKer who almost took my life was now nothing but a terrified little boy who screamed for his mother, tears streaming down his face.

"Don't do it," Agil said urgently as we all approached.

It looked as if not doing so had taken a tremendous force of will. The edge of her sword had drawn a shallow cut in the boy's neck, a thin line of red glowing beneath it. "Why?" she shouted, her face a blade-width from Reznor's. I started to reply, thinking the question was directed at Agil. But then she immediately went on, more quietly but no less fiercely, tears forming in her eyes. "Why did you do it?"

"Because you did it to me!" The boy sobbed, trembling in her grasp as he looked down at the sword at his neck with terror-filled eyes. Agil and Kibaou looked poleaxed, the two men standing there with their mouths hanging open as he said this.

"Please," Reznor begged. "I want to go home, please don't kill me, I want to go home, I want to go hoooome…"

The sword left the boy's neck, lowering a few centimeters. "How old are you, really?" Camilla said quietly, the rage leaving her face slowly.

Diminished by the state he was in, Reznor now looked every bit the age that he now admitted. "Th-thirteen."

"It was you earlier," I said, laying a hand on my wife's sword arm. She withdrew the weapon, looking horrified and ashamed, and sheathed it as she let Reznor's collar slip from her fingers. He sank to the ground, shaking and still crying. "You were the PKer who attacked us. You and I both I changed when Kayaba altered our appearances, but Camilla doesn't look much different than she did before. You recognized her."

"I-I'm sorry," he pleaded up at us, rubbing at his eyes as he repeated himself, stumbling over his words. "I'm so sorry, I just want to wake up and go home to my mom… this isn't a game anymore. I just want to go home…"

"We all do," Camilla said quietly. "But we can't."

I looked back at the other two adults, who had been completely silent since Reznor broke down. Kibaou looked uncomfortable, but was no longer glaring at Camilla the way he had been most of the day. Agil simply looked sad, an anguished expression on his face as he looked down at the little boy who was just as much a prisoner of this world as we were. Camilla and I exchanged a look, and when I nodded fractionally at her she went to open her inventory.

Reznor looked up at her with renewed fear in his eyes as she did, recoiling and starting to stammer. But what materialized in her hand was a red flask with a stopper that she popped with her thumb. The flask shattered into polygonal fragments, and a red glow settled over the boy at our feet. He watched with a lack of comprehension as his HP bar started gradually rising out of the red zone from the effects of the potion.

"I-I don't…"

"Think of it as a second chance," I said. "You didn't actually PK anyone; you'll probably be green again tomorrow."

"You said it yourself," Camilla added, her arms folding across her chest. "This isn't a game anymore. If you PK someone, they'll be dead for real, forever… and you'll hate yourself for the rest of your life."

Still shaking, Reznor got to his feet and looked around at each of us. Nobody spoke. The boy looked as if he was waiting for someone to pull the rug out from under him, for one of us to contradict what we'd said and punish him.

When none of us yelled or made any further threatening moves, he turned and ran, disappearing into the woods.

"That was generous of you," Agil said, breaking the silence with the deep rumble of his voice.

I shook my head. "He's just a scared kid who hadn't really processed what's happened to him. To all of us." In truth, I understood him a bit better than I liked to admit. When he was pleading for his life, I heard the same terror I'd felt in the plaza when we all learned the truth about this Death Game. If I'd been less than half my age and here all alone, who knows what I would've done or been capable of?

Nodding at this, Agil looked between Camilla and me, his expression thoughtful. "I'm sorry I doubted you," he said. "Both of you. I'd be pleased to go adventuring with you again… and to call you friends."

My wife smiled as she wiped her face dry. "I'd like that very much."

"As would I," I said, rubbing my back where I could still feel a lingering numbness in the spot where I'd been struck. "For now, I think we'd all better get back to the town before anything else pops here. It's getting late."

"A sound idea," Agil agreed, shouldering his axe. "For safety's sake, let's return together." He turned and looked meaningfully at Kibaou, who hesitated before nodding wordlessly.

"Let's," Camilla and I agreed, the four of us heading towards the distant smell of wood smoke and safety.


	9. Storytime

The mood in our group was solemn while we made our way back through the forest beyond Horunka, the scent of wood-burning stoves and the sounds of life growing closer as the sun dipped below the horizon. Agil and Camilla resumed their earlier conversation, albeit in Japanese to avoid the kind of misunderstanding that occurred earlier, but neither could seem to conjure up the easy humor that had existed before the would-be PKer kid betrayed us. Kibaou hung back a little, seeming uninterested in their stories of the real world. I supposed that was better than suspicion and hostility.

When at last Agil and my wife seemed to run out of things to say, I stepped into the gap and brought the subject back to the game. "You said you were planning on picking up some support skills," I began, addressing the massive axe wielder. "Economics and appraisal or things like that."

"That's right," Agil confirmed. "With so many people focused only on the combat skills essential to survival, I suspect there's going to be a great demand for trustworthy player services to barter equipment. Perhaps it will be different on higher floors, but right now there's only so much you can get from NPC vendors, and the players who are putting items up for sale rather than vendoring them are charging ridiculous prices."

"Whatever the market will bear," I agreed. "You don't want to know what that healing crystal I used earlier cost us."

"Not that it wasn't worth every col," Camilla put in quickly, poking me affectionately in the arm. "But let us know when you start leveling up those skills, Agil. It'd be nice to have the services of a player we can trust."

The prospect of having customers—and friends—seemed to please the gentle giant of a man. When Agil smiled it transformed his severe features, wiping away their intimidating aura and turning him into someone you wanted watching your back. "You can count on me," he replied. "We're all trapped in here together, and while I have every intention of helping fight to clear this game, I think I can do at least as much good by helping equip players with what they need to survive, and improving the effectiveness of those who are focused on winning our freedom."

"And taking their money," Camilla added, her lips pursed impishly. "All that col in your inventory gets _so_ heavy, after all." Which it didn't, having no weight and taking up no inventory space; it was just a number in our status screen.

Agil grinned, rubbing his bald pate. "Fair prices, I promise."

"Uh huh," I said in good-natured teasing. "I'll remember that when we're walking out of your shop someday with our money in single digits."

"He's right though," Camilla said. "About people only taking essential skills. At this point we've only unlocked what, three skill slots?" Agil and I both nodded. "I don't know how many we get at higher levels, but at the moment I can't imagine taking up one with a bunch of non-combat skills."

"Nor would I quite yet," Agil replied. Gesturing to my wife, he went on. "But your type of character is very skill-heavy in combat. You must have skills for your weapon, your shield, and any armor you use. No doubt there will be skills for holding a monster's attention as well, as there are in other games."

It made perfect sense. I hadn't really thought of it that way. "You're not a pure tank," I said as his meaning came across. "And you use a two-handed weapon. All you'll really need are the skills to equip it and your armor."

"Just so," he said as the town of Horunka drew within sight. Within moments, I saw a purple system message with the words _Safe Zone: Village of Horunka_ appear for a few seconds at the top of my field of view. Each of us sighed with relief as we entered the protected area of the town boundaries, never really able to truly relax as long as we were outside of it.

As we disbanded the group, the three of us exchanged friend requests, promising to meet up again the next time we were hunting in the same area. Camilla and I typically only went out as a duo, not really liking to rely on anyone but each other… however, making a select few reliable friends like Agil could mean the difference between life and death one of these days.

We'd just have to pick them very, very carefully—a lesson that today's near-fiasco had driven home hard. As that train of thought came to an end, I glanced at Kibaou's retreating back. He hadn't even said goodbye, and in fairness, Camilla hadn't had anything to say to him for the entire walk back either. At least he seemed to have enough self-awareness to back off on the hostility once he knew he'd gotten played by a kid. Still: _Never again_, I thought. _Not with him_.

"Inn?" Camilla asked , breaking into my brooding thoughts as we stood just inside the protected area.

"Inn," I agreed, before hesitating. "Actually, let's vendor stuff first. That way we can get an earlier start tomorrow." I glanced towards the NPC item shop down the street; hanging over the entrance was a sign that looked like a picture of a round bag of stuff closed with a drawstring. It struck me with a wave of amusement, and I caught myself snickering out loud and provoking a bemused look from my wife.

"What is it?"

I pointed over at the item shop. "It just struck me as funny is all. Hundreds of thousands of man-hours must have gone into the development of this game, easily. Let's set aside the unimaginable complexity of the game engine, because that's way above my pay grade as a developer. All of the attention to detail and realism that went into the art assets, the quest design, the loot tables, game balance, dialogue and voice acting… and the symbol for the item shop is the same clichéd bag of loot that's been in almost every RPG for the last thirty years."

Camilla's eyes had begun to glaze over as I started talking about software development, but when I got to the punch line of my speech she cackled with laughter. "Oh, that's awesome. Come on, let's—" She stopped suddenly, her gaze shifting a few doors further down to where the NPC weaponsmith was. An androgynous black-haired youth not much older-looking than Reznor was reclaiming an expensive-looking black sword from the equipment repair NPC. As the boy took a moment to evaluate the results, I whistled appreciatively—it was gorgeous. The flat of the blade itself was a deep midnight color with a lighter delta-shaped crossguard; only the very edges of the blade gleamed with razor sharpness.

Camilla seized my arm, pointing excitedly. "Oh my God. I _have_ to have that sword."

"So ask him where he got it," I suggested, nodding in the youth's direction.

My wife started towards him, but he was already turning and walking away from the smith. "Hey, kid!" she called out, waving her hand in the air and breaking into a jog. The boy looked back over his shoulder, a look of surprise quickly replaced by one of uncomfortable wariness. He started running with absolutely _astonishing_ speed, quickly outpacing my armor-laden spouse.

"You scared him off," I called out to her, laughing as I caught up.

Camilla punched me lightly in the arm. "It's not funny," she said as she tried not to smile wistfully. "That was the most beautiful sword I've seen in the game yet."

"Beautiful," I pointed out, "does not necessarily mean powerful. Besides, black doesn't really suit you."

"Point," she admitted, visibly setting aside her fantasies of what she could do with a weapon like that. "Oh well. It probably drops from something we can't kill yet. Come on; let's go vendor all this trash and get something to eat."

* * *

When we came downstairs for dinner, the common room of Horunka's inn was busier than we'd expected. We'd seen very few other players when we were grinding in this area on launch day, and even today there hadn't been too many other groups hunting the same areas as we. But as evening fell a new wave of players had swarmed into town, drawn by rumors and the prospect of safe refuge from the approaching night. We'd been smart to rent a room earlier in the day when we first arrived; if we'd waited until nightfall there would have been no lodging left in the small village.

The air was filled with pipe smoke, the aromas of homecooked food, and dozens of loud, overlapping conversations. We pounced on the only open table as soon as the previous patrons stood up from it, not even waiting for an NPC to take away their dishes.

"This is insane," I said, looking around as the wall of noise overloaded my senses.

"Not surprising," my wife replied as an NPC waitress came by and cleared the table. "This is the nearest town to the Starting City, it's got all the basic amenities, and it's listed in the game guide. It's going to be like Mardis Gras at night here for a while."

"Like what?" I asked. That wasn't a phrase I'd heard her use before.

A look of momentary sadness crossed Camilla's face, banished just as quickly. "You know Mardis Gras," she repeated. "It's an American festival, but we have it here too." By _we_ and _here_ she meant Japan; even now it still tickled me when I caught her using inclusive language to refer to her adopted country.

Then understanding struck. "Ah!" She'd pronounced _Mardis Gras _as she would've in English the first time she said it, and as _Marudi Gura_ in Japanese phonetics the second time. "Got it. Yeah, I see what you mean."

The NPC waitress had been silent while the player characters were speaking. As soon as there was a pause in our conversation, she bowed and asked if we wanted anything.

Camilla and I looked at each other. "What do you have?" I asked.

As soon as I said this, a pop-up window appeared in front of each of us with a list of available food and drink. The prices were shown in a column beside each name; the NPC went into an idle animation as she waited for us to order. We both laughed at the break in roleplaying immersion. "I'll have… um…"

"_No nattou_."

"There isn't any," I complained defensively. I selected a stew that sounded decent and wasn't too expensive, and a cup of tea to go with it. After Camilla made her own selections, our windows disappeared and the NPC bowed again. "Thank you for your patronage. I'll return shortly with your orders."

As we waited, a few players got into a loud argument several tables away over loot distribution. Both of them swiped at the air in a way that looked like they were closing windows we couldn't see, and one threw his bowl of soup at the other. The bowl and soup alike sailed through the air and struck a wall, shattering into green particles and disappearing.

"At least cleanup around here has to be a breeze," Camilla observed in amusement.

"Making a note not to party with those two," I replied, only half-joking.

"After what happened earlier, I'm not so sure I want to party with anyone we don't already know and trust."

At that moment a girl's nasal voice sounded from behind us. "Speaking of which..."

Both of us turned our heads. The voice had come from a girl—or, at least, a small woman—whose features were mostly in shadow from the cloak and hood she wore. All we could see of her face was a cute, mischievous smile and a set of what looked like _whiskers_ drawn on her cheeks. She was leaning against the nearby wall, and I could've sworn that we hadn't seen her there before.

"I'm sorry," Camilla said cautiously, "but do we know you?"

"I don't know," the girl said enigmatically and unhelpfully. "Do you?" She grabbed a chair from a nearby table as one of its patrons left, scooting it over to ours without being invited. "Name's Argo."

"Argo," I repeated, a light coming on in my head. "You're the one who wrote that book we got at the Starting City. Thank you for that."

"Oho," she said. "You're a sharp one. You'd be surprised how many players don't even know it's there."

"No, I really wouldn't," I replied. Out of any online game's population, the percentage of people who actually took the time to study the game mechanics and strategy guides amounted to a very tiny minority. Most were casual players.

The NPC waitress returned with our food, setting a stew and tea in front of me, and a hamburger and fries with coffee in front of Camilla. As the waitress bowed and left, my wife looked at Argo through the steam rising from our food. "Can we help you with something?" she asked directly.

"Mebbe," the girl responded. "Rumor around town is you two had a run-in with a PKer earlier."

I blinked at her several times. "Who the hell told you that?"

"I'll reveal that for 300 col," Argo replied cheerfully.

Camilla and I looked at each other and shrugged. "Don't worry about it," my wife answered. "What's it to you though?"

"Simple," Argo said, reaching over and stealing a fry from Camilla's plate while her hands were full with her hamburger. "I want their name and description. Knowing who's a PK and who isn't is incredibly valuable information, especially with the situation being what it is now. I'll pay you for it and you'll be doing every other player in the game a huge favor. Maybe even saving lives."

My wife and I exchanged another look. I could practically read the thoughts going through her head as our eyes met; they were bound to be similar to mine. We'd healed Reznor and let him go because when it all came down to it, he was nothing more than a scared little boy stranded in a hostile world all alone with no hope of seeing his family again anytime soon.

He might've been a bratty little kid on the outside world… but he was still just a _kid._ Outing him and branding him as a player killer could very well be a death sentence for him, and would certainly all but eliminate any chance he might have had for redemption or friendship in this world.

"I'm very sorry," Camilla said finally. "But I don't think we want to do that."

This was obviously the absolute last response that Argo had expected to get. Her mouth dropped open for a moment, and as she raised her head I could see dark eyes and a messy curtain of short brown hair under the hood." But… why not?"

"That's a bit hard to explain," I began after washing down a mouthful of stew. "But I tell you what: instead of their name, I'll give you a story."

A story could still have useful information to sell, and I could see Argo reaching the same conclusion. She leaned her chair back against the wall and crossed her legs, gesturing for me to go on. Without naming names, I described our encounter with Reznor earlier the previous day before Kayaba's announcement—and how we'd met him in a party today after he'd been reverted to his real-life appearance.

Camilla picked up the story there, leaving out Agil and Kibaou's names and descriptions, and going into more detail once she got to the part where Reznor had stabbed me in the back. I could still feel a faint numbness there, which at this rate would probably be gone by the time I woke up. I hoped.

"At that point," she concluded, "we realized that he was just a dumb, scared 13-year-old kid. He was crying and apologizing and begging us not to kill him, babbling in fear about wanting to go home and see his mother. I couldn't do it. I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if I had. So we healed him with a potion, told him that since he hadn't killed anyone yet he was getting a second chance to stay on the side of the angels, and let him go."

Argo was motionless as she listened, her expression unchanging. When we got to the end of our tale, she let the chair tip back so that all four legs were on the ground, and steepled her fingers on the table. "Hell of a story."

Camilla nodded; I shrugged. "I'm sorry," I said, "but that's the limit of what we can tell you. We're not giving up his name. I think he'll be alright if someone gives him a chance to be. He won't have that chance if everyone in the game thinks he's a PKer."

Argo nodded wordlessly to me, pushing back the chair and rising to her feet. Delicate fingers danced in the air as she manipulated some menu window we couldn't see. A few moments later, a trade window appeared in front of me with no items in it. Instead there were a series of digits denoting a one-sided offer of money. The amount would've stolen my breath if I had any.

"Get yourselves some more healing items to replace the ones you used," she said as I pressed the option to accept the payment. "I gotta go."

Camilla couldn't see my trade window, but the look on my face spoke volumes. She ventured one final question as Argo turned to leave. "What are you going to tell anyone who asks about the PKer?"

For a moment, Argo hesitated as if she was thinking about quoting a price for revealing even that. At last, she replied with perfect honesty, "That you defeated him."

My wife and I turned to look at each other, and smiled. When we turned back, Argo was gone.

* * *

**Review Reply to Truenikos: **Thank you again! You write the most delightful reviews. As much as I would like to cop to the cool necromancy angle, it's simply that when I'm inspired and have a solid voice for a set of characters in my head, the words just kind of demand to come out. When I'm uninspired, no amount of staring at the screen will make them come; witness the decade-long dry spell between these stories and my previous fics which left two stories irrecoverably stranded. I'm intent on not allowing that to happen here.

With regard to the value of col, once again you've shown an insightful eye for identifying a problem with which I've struggled. The fact is that the canonical source material leaves the purchasing power of col somewhat ambiguous, and in truth this is probably unavoidable and even realistic. It is an article of economic truth that the value of any thing is equal to the price a buyer is willing to pay for it.

I spent a number of years raiding three times a week in a top raid guild, and one thing I've learned in my time playing MMOs is that the economy can be very... fluid. This is especially true right after a game launches or a new expansion comes out, when the market value of new and unfamiliar content has not stabilized. It helps that this story is set right after the SAO launch and from the viewpoint of characters who are just as much in the dark about how much col items are worth as the reader (and for that matter, the author) is. You'll notice that I typically gloss over exact prices in col for system-generated values that should be constant, such as the prices of food on a menu or NPC-sold equipment, and for the most part only get specific about money when I'm talking about prices chosen arbitrarily by players-in which the _character_ can be wrong without the _story_ being wrong, if that makes sense.


	10. Heroes

The next day, we found to our chagrin that we'd become minor celebrities amongst some of the players operating out of Horunka. One or more people had obviously paid Argo for details about the rumored PVP fight in the woods, and word had spread—embellished and exaggerated along the way—that we'd fought and taken down a would-be player killer.

With everyone still coming to terms with the prospect of being stuck in this world and facing the possibility of true death, no one wanted to admit that there were people who would actually still attack and kill another player with the full knowledge that it was murder. The romanticized story of a husband and wife who'd stood against a PKer and prevailed had apparently spread like wildfire through the town. When we first left our inn room and started down the stairs towards the common area, we were embarrassed—and greatly confused—to be greeted by applause and cheers from the room full of players having breakfast there. Several players stopped us to congratulate us on our way down, and a party of three hastily finished their meals and gave up their table when they saw us begin searching for a place to sit.

"_Awk_ward," Camilla said in singsong English as we seated ourselves, most of the players in the room resuming their meals.

"Tell me about it," I said quietly. "Wonder what'll happen if Kibaou shows up and starts talking about what really happened."

"Or Agil. He'll never let us hear the end of it," Camilla added as she waved over the NPC waitress. "Why don't we put off this discussion until later?"

Before I could reply or order any food, I heard footsteps approaching our table. "Excuse me," said a swordsman wearing a few pieces of light plate armor. Stopping before us, he executed a deep bow, long hair in a shade of deep electric blue falling forward and shading his face. "Would you permit me to intrude for a minute?"

Since the man was being extremely polite, I saw no reason to say no. I looked over at Camilla, who arched her eyebrows and shrugged. "Of course," I replied, gesturing to the empty chair. "We were just about to have breakfast."

"Please," the man said, "allow me to pay for your meal. All of us owe you a debt of gratitude; it's the least I can do."

Camilla and I exchanged uneasy looks. That came uncomfortably close to taking advantage of someone else's misunderstanding, but I didn't see a way to refuse without being rude.

"Don't worry about it," he added. "You won't be putting me at a disadvantage; I am not short of money."

"Neither are we," I replied, thinking of the considerable sum that Argo had paid us the night before. "But we gratefully accept your offer."

"The honor is mine," he said, waving at the waitress. "I am Diabel. Please, order whatever you like."

We did so, introducing ourselves and thanking him as the NPC waitress sauntered off. After she left, Diabel placed his hands on the table and smiled to each of us in turn. "Aside from this small gesture of thanks, I've come to you with a proposition that I hope you'll consider. Will you hear me out?"

_Here it comes_. I tried not to think cynical thoughts as Diabel's question registered, and nodded towards him. "Go on."

"Thank you," Diabel said, dipping his head towards me in return. "I think it should go without saying that until someone reaches the top of Aincrad and defeats the end boss on the 100th floor, we have slim hope of seeing our homes again. I believe that we all have an obligation to strengthen ourselves and push forward as quickly as possible with that goal in mind, for the sake of all players and those we have left behind." For a moment after saying that, there was the briefest flicker of sadness in the man's eyes—but it was gone before I could be sure. "Do you agree?"

Diabel had a charismatic presence and a way with words that was inspiring; although my wife and I had planned on playing cautiously and on our own, it was impossible to deny that what he said was true, and difficult not to feel the sense of obligation of which he spoke. Both of us nodded.

He smiled broadly. "I thought as much when I heard the story of what you did. I'm assembling a team of skilled, trustworthy players with the aim of conquering the dungeon that leads to the first floor boss. We'll need to level up considerably in order to have a chance of progressing, and clearing this first dungeon will be neither quick nor easy—the work of weeks at the very least, most likely. Having a dedicated tank would be invaluable in preventing casualties while we progress."

Camilla's mouth fell slightly open as Diabel spoke, the implication clear. She turned her eyes to me. "I.."

Seeming to understand her hesitation, Diabel spoke up quickly. "Of course we'd absolutely welcome your husband as well. To hear it told, he's as skilled as you are, and we'd be foolish to turn away anyone we could trust to stand at our sides."

"Diabel," I said carefully, choosing each word deliberately. "We are not ungrateful for your offer, but I'm sure that whatever you've heard about the incident in the woods has been greatly embellished in the retelling."

"I have no doubt that is so," Diabel replied with a wry and knowing smile. "Nonetheless."

"Please understand our indecision," Camilla said as the waitress returned and set our orders before the three of us. I could tell from her slow, deliberate speech that she was putting great effort into eliminating the Kansai accent from her voice and speaking as politely as possible. "And understand that we intend no offense. We were betrayed yesterday by a party member, and it makes us hesitate to join another group right away. And our levels are not high; I doubt that we are as skilled as you have heard."

"The optimal level to clear this first dungeon is only around 10," Diabel answered, taking a sip of tea. "And levels can be gained; we've only been here a few days and any disparity in our levels is not significant. What I'm looking for is integrity and strength of spirit. As for your other concern…" He spread his hands. "There's nothing I can say to that other than that I understand your position and hope that you will decide to lend us your strength."

An itch formed at the base of my neck as Diabel spoke, a nagging suspicion about a few things he'd said. Camilla gave voice to my thoughts. "Begging your pardon," she said, her words fighting for priority with several slices of bacon, "but how would you know what level you have to be to clear the dungeon?" No such information had been in the guide or in any of the FAQs we'd read.

Diabel seemed to realize he might've said too much. He hesitated noticeably, and took a bite of his _okonomiyaki _in lieu of a reply.

"You were a beta-tester," I said quietly, not meaning it as a question.

He recovered quickly, but the slight widening of his eyes when I said that confirmed my suspicions.

"Thank you," I said, leaning forward in a sitting bow. "We're the ones who owe you a debt."

This, at last, seemed to shake the man's unflappable demeanor. "I… what?"

I summoned the game guide from my inventory and let it drop to the table beside me. "Argo's guide. It's supposedly compiled from information that the testers provided. We're grateful for that."

Diabel invested a great deal of attention into chewing and swallowing his food. Washing it down with the last of his tea, he said hesitantly, "There has been… some resentment, these first few days. Some of those who were in the closed beta rushed ahead and used their knowledge selfishly. Groups have been arriving at previously unknown areas to find them already cleared. I've heard grumblings of discontent and even hostility directed at anyone who admits they were a tester." He paused, and until he spoke I realized he still hadn't admitted whether or not I was right. "I would appreciate your discretion."

"We understand," Camilla assured him. "Will you give us some time to discuss your proposal and think it over?"

Diabel appeared mildly disappointed, but he bowed politely to us again as he rose to his feet and prepared to take his leave. "Of course," he said. "Here." He opened his menu and sent each of us a friend request, which we accepted after a moment's hesitation. "My group and I will be working our way through the foothills on the other side of the forest. The enemies there are strong, but if we have a full group the risk is small and we will all level up quickly. Please send me a message as soon as you've made your decision." Again there was that stirring note of conviction in his voice, and something else. Pride, perhaps. "Clearing the first floor would send a powerful message to everyone that we, as players, are not helpless in the face of the hand we've been dealt. You could help make a real difference." He bowed one last time, and left us.

As Diabel exited through the inn's front door, I turned to my wife and silently mouthed two words to her. _What now?_

"Now," Camilla said, attacking her bacon and fried potatoes with renewed fervor, "we finish our breakfast in peace."

* * *

Our 15 minutes of fame was getting annoying.

Everywhere we went in town, some player inevitably tried to stop us and either congratulate us, or thank us for what we hadn't really done. More than once we were invited to party with complete strangers, and had to struggle not to give unintentional offense as we turned each of them down. A few players even offered us gifts of potions or items; most of these we declined after coming up with the approach of telling them that we'd rather they use them to keep themselves alive. What was mostly a desire not to take advantage of people's misconceptions was only rarely taken as an insult, and far more often misconstrued as altruism.

Unfortunately, Camilla's distinctive appearance made it nearly impossible to try to blend in and avoid the attention. There just weren't very many leggy American redheads running around in Aincrad.

"If the truth ever comes out," I said under my breath when we got a moment's respite, "there's going to be a lot of very unhappy players in this town."

"Just roll with it," Camilla said mildly as we approached the northern edge of town. "There's really nothing we can do about it. Relax, be polite, and don't freak—" Both she and her words stopped in their tracks as Agil emerged from the item shop not far from us. I stopped about a pace ahead of her and looked back questioningly.

"I changed my mind," she said abruptly, moving to stand behind me and hunching down as if she wanted to disappear. "Hide me."

"You're two inches taller than I am," I said over my shoulder. "Whatever happened to just rolling with it?"

"Let's just roll our way towards the stables before he sees us." Camilla asked, trying to align her head behind mine with all the effectiveness of the sun trying to hide behind the moon.

"You're being absurd," I said, rolling my eyes and stepping aside. "_Hey, Agil!_"

"You're so dead," she said through clenched teeth that somewhat resembled a smile, waving in return as Agil waved to us and approached.

"Just relax, be polite, and don't freak out," I replied, knowing full well I was going to pay for that later.

"Ah," Agil said with grandiosity and widely spread arms as he drew close. "Our triumphant heroes make an appearance."

"It wasn't our idea," we both said at once.

"I know," he replied with a grin. "I've heard at least five different versions of the story since last night. About the only thing they had in common is that you two were attacked by a PKer and he lost. I imagine that was the kernel of truth that grew into legend overnight?"

I palmed my face. "It's not that bad, is it? Tell me the story hasn't made it to the Starting City, please."

The giant man shrugged. "I wouldn't know; I haven't been back there. But 'legend' is somewhat hyperbolic. Let's just say you're being talked about here in Horunka—sometimes by name and sometimes by description." He turned his grin to Camilla. "The latter of which usually involves a certain flame-haired _gaikokujin _Valkyrie who came dashing in to rescue her beloved from certain death at the hands of a merciless PKer."

"Valkyries have blonde hair," she said shortly. "Look, Agil, I'm sorry. We didn't ask for this. Rumors of an attempted PK hit the town at some point last night, and we were approached by someone who offered to pay us for the identity of the PKer."

"And you wouldn't tell them."

She looked surprised. "Well, of course. But how did you know?"

Agil shrugged. "Because if you had, everyone would know it by now." He looked meaningfully at both of us in turn. "It's a good thing, what you did."

"And it's brought us so much good fortune," I said with some annoyance.

"As is so often the case with good deeds. Are you planning on disabusing everyone of their misunderstanding?"

Camilla and I looked at each other. "We've been seriously thinking about it," I answered. "We didn't ask to be heroes. We especially don't want to be heroes for something we didn't even do. It feels like we're lying to everyone and taking advantage of them."

"Ah," Agil replied, nodding. "It's your choice, of course, and you didn't ask for my advice. But I think you should let people believe what they want to."

Camilla had a look of beleaguered resignation as she asked the question. "Why?"

"Hope," Agil began simply, gesturing for us to follow him as he walked towards the outer boundary of the town. "Ever since Kayaba's announcement of our imprisonment here, there has been a pall of despair and helplessness hanging over everyone. Bickering over trivial things. Even suicides. It's one of the reasons I left the Starting City; the mood there was oppressive. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time before PKing became a problem, and that anyone could be a potential PKer. You've shown them that they don't have to be afraid. People are smiling again. Even if it only lasts for a few days, that's worth something."

I started to open my mouth, but Camilla laid a hand on my arm before I could say anything, allowing Agil to continue. It struck me at that moment that although he was obviously completely fluent in the language, he usually had a very deliberate way of speaking in Japanese that was much like the way my wife talked when she was using polite language with strangers—as if he, as an intimidating-looking foreigner, felt the need to be overly careful of the manner in which he spoke lest he give offense.

"This tale has made these players hopeful. It's romantic and positive, and it's given them something to laugh and cheer and feel good about. It doesn't matter how much of it is true. What matters is that they believe it, and that they don't feel hopeless anymore while they believe it."

Both of us said nothing. The system message _Leaving Safe Area_ appeared briefly in our high peripheral vision, and the three of us came to a stop.

"You can do what you want, of course," Agil said finally, folding his arms across his breastplate. "Just give it some thought before taking that away from them."

Camilla swallowed once, and nodded. "I think you're right. Thank you for your perspective."

I nodded as well, offering my hand to Agil. "Agreed. Now, why don't the three of us go hunting? We'd both like to get out of the town, and we shouldn't lose any more time that could be spent grinding and farming."

As we shook, Agil clapped his other arm on my shoulder and gave a sigh of regret. "I'd like to, my friends, but I've already promised to go hunt with another group in a dangerous area, and it's not my party to invite anyone to." A pause, and then: "And I suspect the two of you might be understandably reluctant to join another pickup group anyway."

"Truth," I replied. "That's quite all right, Agil; there'll be other days."

"That reminds me," Camilla said suddenly. "I wanted to ask you something. A stranger invited us to join some kind of 'elite' group that's planning on making a serious push to clear the first floor dungeon. We don't know him or his group, and we weren't really sure what to do—especially since we're not that powerful yet."

Agil looked momentarily surprised. "Is that so? By any chance did the person who invited you have blue hair?"

It was our turn to look surprised. "Yes," I said while Camilla tried to find her voice. "He said his name was Diabel. Do you know if we can trust him?"

The tall black man's laughter was like the deep rumble of wagon wheels on stone. "Trust him? I should hope so," he said. "It is his group I'm going off to meet."


	11. The Crossing

Neither Camilla nor I were particularly religious, nor were we superstitious in any meaningful way—if we spoke of anything like "jinxes" or "miracles", it was said idiomatically with tongue firmly in cheek.

Nonetheless, it was hard to take Agil's revelation as anything but a clear sign. We trusted him—if no one else on this game beyond each other, we trusted Agil—and learning that he himself was now a part of the advance group Diabel was forming washed away most of our misgivings. We knew he was of a somewhat comparable level to us, he trusted Diabel, and he shared that feeling of obligation to help make a difference in this world. At that point, it was all but impossible to decline the invitation.

Agil seemed very pleased when Camilla sent a private message to Diabel, letting him know that we'd decided to join him and asking where we should meet. The delighted reply was swift in coming: beyond the forest maze around the village, there was a series of foothills leading into a low mountain range that cut across the first floor of Aincrad and ended near a lake on the eastern side. We were to take the northern path out of town and follow it until we reached a rope bridge spanning a shallow gorge.

Diabel and his group would be hunting in that area, and once we were all together we would advance into the mountains and try to make it across them and as far as we could, with the intent of driving towards the ruins and forest surrounding the dungeon on the north edge of the floor. We would not be returning to Horunka for some time and would not have access to repair NPCs until we reached another town; Diabel advised us to take all the time we needed to purchase camping gear and provisions, and to ensure that all of our equipment was in top condition.

"This is serious business," I said as I stowed our new survival gear in our shared inventory. Either of us could've done this, but since I was the one Argo had paid, we decided that I'd make the purchases rather than wasting time shuffling money around between us. "Makes me feel like we're back in a lead raiding guild, camping named placeholders or going on one of those epic multi-day dungeon crawls."

"Except now it's for real," Camilla replied, withdrawing a sheepskin scroll from under her breastplate and running her finger down one side. "Okay, that's the sleeping bag that you just bought, right?"

"Right."

"Check. Tent?"

When I didn't answer right away, my wife turned and looked at me. "Tent?"

My mouth twitched a few times, and finally I couldn't hold it in. I leaned back against the counter in the item shop, snorted once, and then laughed myself silly. It took her socking me in the arm several times before I stopped cracking up. "I'm sorry," I said, still snickering as I waved my hand to ward off another punch in the arm. "It's just… here we are, trapped in a virtual world with over nine thousand lives on the line, wearing fantasy armor and weapons and preparing to go on an epic quest to do battle with untold legions of fell beasts… and _you have a checklist for it._"

Camilla looked almost perplexed. "Well, of course," she said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "We can't afford to forget anything. Tent?"

"Would you like me to bring it out and show it to you?"

"I'll take that as a yes. Check. Food and drink?"

"Two stacks of each, basic rations. They're not exciting but we won't be distracted by hunger or thist."

"Check." As she said this each time, she scratched a glowing line on the paper with a fingertip. "Consumable repair kits?"

"Is this boring you?" I asked Agil, glancing over to the large man who was politely trying not to laugh.

"Far be it from me to intervene in your domestic affairs," he replied with a smile. Agil was fully equipped and could've gone on ahead, but the three of us agreed that we'd all be safer travelling together.

"Consumable repair kits?" Camilla repeated.

"Two for each of us, just in case we run into mobs that attack equipment durability."

"Check. Recovery items?"

I checked our inventory to be sure—which, it occurred to me, she could just as easily be doing herself—and counted off each type of item on my fingers as I spoke. "Four healing crystals, ten healing potions, two anti-status potions, two antidote potions, and at least two each for getting rid of every other status effect that we currently know of."

Agil whistled. "That must've set you back quite a lot of money."

"Not nearly as much as these," I said as I materialized a pair of crystals the color of lapis lazuli which shone with an inner light.

"Those…" I'd never seen Agil looking as stunned as he was then, not even during the incident with Reznor. "Those are teleport crystals. I've seen them up for auction, but not yet for a price I was willing to pay."

"Their drop rate must be pretty low," I admitted, exchanging a look with my wife. "Getting our hands on them wiped out most of what we had left. If things go south in a hurry—and that's a very real possibility—I want us to have an escape route. We won't use them unless we absolutely must."

I stored them in my inventory screen, and then explained, "Hold one in your hand and say 'teleport', then the name of the town. I suggest we agree to use Horunka; it's much faster to say than _Hajimari no Machi_." Which was the actual name of the Starting City in Japanese.

Camilla nodded her agreement. "If we're in a situation where we have to use these, a single syllable could be the difference between a wipe and survival." She paused briefly, and with a smile added: "Check."

That brought our shopping trip to a close. Camilla crumpled up the scroll until it dissipated into a shimmering green particle effect. "Shall we?"

I checked my system menu. It was already almost noon. "We can eat on the way," I said. "Let's get going."

* * *

The journey to the foothills was relatively uneventful. The forest slowly gave way to intermittent clumps of alpine trees, set on rolling hills shot through frequently with outcroppings of stratified white stone that pushed out of the smooth carpet of grass like bones through skin. Now and then we caught sight of other adventuring parties in the distance, or passed a returning group of players on the unpaved dirt road. Pops were infrequent as long as we stayed on the path, although every now and then we'd pull an isolated mob if it was close to the road—if for no other reason than so that we got some productive use out of our travel time.

It was still early afternoon when we finally caught sight of the rope bridge that Diabel had mentioned. It was a frightful, rickety structure that spanned a gorge perhaps ten or twelve meters across, secured at either end to a pair of posts driven into the rocky soil that were the diameter of a man's leg. The walking surface of the bridge consisted of wooden planks perhaps half a meter across, separated by uneven gaps that looked like they could be spanned by stepping carefully. Handrails, such as they were, consisted of a pair of ropes secured to the logs at either end at just above waist height.

Peering over the edge of the cliff, we could see a river—or a wide stream, at least—of indeterminate depth that lay at the bottom of a twenty-meter drop. We couldn't see any white water that would indicate the presence of rocks, but it would be a lethal fall if we weren't careful while crossing.

The sight of it threatened to bring on a panic attack. I've never been dysfunctionally afraid of heights, but I couldn't say that I _liked_ them either—and this situation was a whole lot different than looking over the side of a high-rise balcony. That is, unless it was a balcony we were about to climb over in order to walk a tightrope to the next high-rise.

I looked at my companions. It was hard to tell, given the color of his skin, but I could've sworn that Agil looked a little pale. Camilla stood off to one side at the threshold of the bridge, running her gaze thoughtfully along its length and back as if planning her steps.

"Let me message Diabel," she said finally. "I'm not sure whether he's on this side or the other, and he might have information we'd want to know before crossing."

As she pulled down her menu and began typing out a private message in the air at waist height, I turned to Agil and gave him a nudge. "You all right?"

Either I'd been imagining Agil's discomfort at the prospect of crossing, or he'd mastered it. "Fine," he said, smiling over at me. "You?"

"Fine," I lied, grinning to cover my anxiety. Then I stopped and added, "I'm not looking forward to it, don't get me wrong… but it doesn't look like we have a choice, not unless we want to spend a lot of time looking for a way around it."

"Which there might not be," Agil pointed out. "This is an artificial world, after all."

Camilla dismissed her menu. "Okay, Diabel says to come on across carefully—one at a time is best. They're hunting on the other side, so they're heading back this direction now and will meet us here."

"I'll go first," I said suddenly, before I could change my mind. Camilla and Agil both looked at me in mild surprise, my wife's expression shifting to puzzlement and then concern. Sometimes, having a spouse who knows you too well could be a disadvantage.

"Hon, what are you doing?"

In truth, I was determined to conquer my fear—and I was afraid that if everyone else went first, I might not be able to force myself across. But there was another reason. "I'm the lightest of the three of us. If it can't take my weight, it won't take any of ours. Better that we know that sooner than later." _And_, I added silently, _you're far more valuable here_.

I could tell Camilla didn't like it one bit. I saw her chewing at her upper lip as she tried to think of a flaw in my reasoning. I could think of several, but I wasn't going to help her come up with one.

As it happened, she didn't need the help. "Another way of looking at it," she said finally, "is that if I go across first, we'll know for sure that it'll hold everyone's weight. If I can make it across, we know it'll support both of you. Besides, Diabel obviously made it across. He's a plate tank too."

"Light plate. A few pieces. He doesn't have as much heavy armor as you do."

Agil stepped forward. "Intending no offense, Camilla, but I'd be willing to wager I'm heavier than you even after factoring in your armor. I'll go."

My wife looked Agil up and down, as if sizing him up. She might be fairly tall and decked out in plate armor, but he was a lot more massive than she was—and this wasn't the real world, after all; for all we knew the system measured the weight of players differently than items. I wouldn't have wanted to try betting on either of them having the right of it. After a moment, she held out both hands, right fist resting lightly in her left palm. "_Janken_?"

Agil looked confused for a moment, and then laughed, holding his hands out in front of him the same way. "Count it."

"_Ichi… ni… san!_" On the count of three, Camilla snapped her fingers out in a "scissors" gesture, while Agil's fist slapped his palm as a "rock". Coughing out a sound of frustration, she looked up at him. "Two out of three?"

"Nice try," he said with a grin. Reaching over his shoulder and making sure that his axe was secure on his back, Agil started walking towards the bridge. "See you on the other side!"

One step. Two steps. Three steps. A step at a time, Agil began making his way across the bridge, cautiously testing each plank while keeping both hands on the rope railing. His progress was excruciatingly slow, and Camilla and I both tensed any time the wind picked up or we thought we heard wood cracking. When Agil reached the halfway point, her hand stole into mine and I gave it a squeeze.

"It's what, about thirty or forty feet?"

I hated Imperial measurements. Taking a moment to do the math, I nodded. "About that. Call it fifteen meters at most; it's hard to be sure from here."

At last Agil stood on the last plank, separated from the solid ground on the other side by about a pace. He let go of both rope railings and pushed off to jump the remaining span, the plank snapping with a splintering sound beneath his feet and bursting into green particles as he fell forward and tumbled to the grass in safety.

Both Camilla and I let out the breaths we'd sharply drawn in at the near-mishap, giving each other an uneasy glance. "That's not good," I said. I called over to Agil and asked if he was okay; he waved.

"It'll be fine. I've got an idea—if I can get close to the other side, I might be able to use Horizontal to dash across without actually putting my weight on the planks in between."

That was actually a really clever plan. "Will that work?"

She shrugged. "It's worth a try. I don't know if I can jump across the gap that's there now. Not in armor, anyway."

The idea that struck me then was so blindingly obvious, I didn't know why we hadn't thought of it before. "Why not take off your armor? It's not like you have to go through the time and effort of physically unbuckling it and putting it back on; just use the equipment menu. It'll take seconds."

Camilla opened her mouth, stopped, and then clapped it shut. "You just want to me to take my clothes off," she teased.

"Always," I agreed. "But just your armor this time."

"Hmph." Camilla opened a menu I couldn't see and began tapping the air. As she did, the various parts of her armor faded away one by one, leaving only the long white tunic she wore underneath with a leather belt cinched around her waist. Her feet were bare; she had no shoes to substitute for her steelthread boots. The only equipment she was still wearing was her sword; she'd need it if she decided to try using a skill to dash across the last gap.

"You going to be all right like that?" I asked.

"Just fine," she said, leaning to the left and to the right as she went through a few stretching exercises. "I used to climb trees in my bare feet when I was a kid. It'll make me more sensitive to what the wood is doing when I step on it anyway."

"Before you go." I tapped her on the arm and made a beckoning motion to her, palm down and waving towards me.

She stepped in close and gave me a quick kiss. "I'll be waiting for you."

Until that point, I don't think there'd been a longer couple of minutes in my life—except for maybe when I'd asked her to marry me. On that day there had been a brief but awful silence in our guild's voice chat following my question, and then everyone else had started talking over each other at once, cheering and yelling their encouragement. I'd had to finally shout for everyone else to shut up so that she could give me an answer, at which point I saw her character log off—I'd been terrified that I'd scared her away. It was probably a good three or four minutes before she came back and sent me a message saying that her connection had dropped, and asked me what it was I'd wanted to talk to her about.

We laughed about that nowadays. I hoped someday we'd be able to laugh about this, too.

Step by step, I watched Camilla make her way across, gingerly setting a foot on each plank in turn and testing it across its width before putting weight on it—a little bit at first, then her full weight with both hands on the rope handrails. When she reached the halfway point, she looked back at me and smiled, giving me a thumbs-up.

That was when I heard the cracking sound. I couldn't tell where it came from, but I whistled loudly to get her attention, waving frantically at her. "Cami, stop!"

She froze in place, eyes scanning the plank beneath her and the ones all around. A look of uncertainty crossed her face, and she turned back to me. "They're fine!" she shouted.

They weren't the problem.

With a loud shattering sound, I saw the two posts that were holding up the rope bridge on my side explode into polygons, as if their durability had been exhausted. I lunged for the ends of the rope that flailed free as their moorings disappeared, but they whipped out of my reach far too quickly.

As she felt the bridge begin to give way beneath her, Camilla slashed her sword free of its scabbard and stabbed downwards, wedging the blade in the gap between two of the planks. I watched helplessly as my side of the bridge swung down, slapping against the far side of the gorge and slamming Camilla into the cliff wall. A portion of her HP ticked away from the impact, but she stayed in the green.

However, the sudden jerk of all that weight on the remaining moorings must have done for them. They too exploded into polygons, but by this point Agil was ready and seized the rope, his arms bulging as he strained to keep Camilla and the remains of the bridge from falling the rest of the way to the bottom. It was only about five meters or so to the rocky shoreline from where she was hanging, but I had no idea what kind of falling damage she'd take without her armor equipped.

I had a sudden thought, and rapidly opened our inventory to summon a healing potion. I tried applying it to her from where I stood, but a system message that said _Target out of range_ mocked my efforts.

There was nothing I could do except watch and scream for her to hang on. I could see Diabel and two other players approaching on the far side, and when they saw what was happening they broke into a dead run. The last of the rope was slowly sliding through Agil's grip, and my wife had let her sword drop to free both of her hands, trying to climb hand over hand up the planks as if they were a ladder. I had a moment of amazement that she could even do that against her own weight, and then realized that the game must be taking into account her STR stat.

Diabel came running up to Agil; seeing how little rope remained he dove to the ground in a last ditch attempt to reach it in time, his eyes wide.

Then Agil cried out as the rope snapped free of his grip.


	12. Logic Puzzle

From the time that the rope slipped out of Agil's hands until Camilla struck the ground below, perhaps all of a second passed. It was barely enough time for me to finish screaming her name.

Trailing the loose rope and tumbling planks like a Chinese dragon, she struck the ground about a meter from the water's edge and bounced once, rolling to the side as the mess of wood and rope began landing in a pile where she'd just been. Starbursts of green polygons sprayed out here and there as some of the planks lost the remainder of their durability. I gave a wordless cry and sank to my knees as I saw the remainder of her HP bar disappear.

Then I realized she hadn't shattered. She was barely moving, her arms hugging her body as she curled into a fetal position, but she wasn't dead. I glanced to the upper left of my HUD where the status of my party members showed, and saw there what wasn't visible to me from this distance on the ribbon around her head: the tiniest, almost invisible sliver of red that remained in her gauge as it flashed critical.

"Rebecca!" I screamed down at her, using her real name without thinking. "Use a crystal!"

There shouldn't have been any pain from her fall, but if my experience with getting stabbed in the back was any clue, her whole body was probably numb to one degree or another, and in any event we still felt the _impact_ from hitting or being hit by objects—and it looked like she was stunned. Glancing again at her HP gauge, I realized that that was literally so: there was an icon flashing beside her gauge that indicated "stun" status, which dimmed her vision and slowed her movement until she recovered from it.

After close to a minute of the terror of not knowing when or whether she was going to recover, I saw her slowly start to uncurl, her movements stiff. With shaking hands, she reached up and finally managed to get her menu open, and I breathed a ragged sob of relief as I watched her HP rapidly rise back to full.

"Are you okay?" I shouted down to her as she rose unsteadily to her feet.

I couldn't really see her expression well from where I stood, but I could guess at it when she shouted back. "What do you think?"

"I think I'm just glad you're alive after that," I called back down. "Now what?"

Camilla planted her hands on her hips and looked slowly around. "There's no way up for as far as I can see in either direction," she replied loudly, projecting her voice to carry over the sound of the water across the distance that separated us. "We've got a shitload of rope down here, but not much I can do with it without climbing gear."

"If you can get the rope to us," Agil yelled, "we can pull you up!" He, at least, wasn't having any trouble making his voice heard.

That, of course, would leave me stranded over here. I took a good hard look at the narrow chasm that separated the two sides. Ten or fifteen meters—somewhere in there; it was hard to tell. With my Agility stat, I _might_ have been able to get up enough of a running start to make the leap across—and then again, I might _not_. If the fall had nearly killed my wife from less than half the height of the gorge, there was no way I'd survive it—she had far more HP than I did.

And if I didn't make the jump, there'd be no respawning and coming back to try again. We had to come up with something else.

Returning from my thoughts, I saw Camilla tossing aside all of the wooden planks and gathering rope. I considered the options. _The gorge is just a little higher than it is wide, maybe by about a third of the width. Assuming it's 15 meters across, call it 20 meters deep. The bridge used four ropes secured to those posts at either side, with a few smaller lengths here and there securing the planks to the lower ropes. If we ignore those smaller bits and tie the four larger ropes together, that gives us about 60 meters of rope in all—or two that are about 30 meters. That's enough to reach the top of the cliff on both sides—_

An idea was forming in my head. I kept kicking it around while Camilla worked.

Camilla tried tying one end of one of the 15-meter lengths of rope to a rock and hurling it with all her might towards the top of the cliff where Diabel and Agil stood ready to catch it. But even with her high STR, the virtual gravity won that battle and the rock came tumbling back down trailing a streamer of rope after only reaching a little over halfway.

"Cami!" I shouted suddenly. "I've got an idea. Take the four largest pieces of rope and store them in our inventory."

I saw her hesitate briefly, and then gather up the rope. One by one she tapped the pieces and dragged their status windows to her inventory window; the rope segments faded away and disappeared.

_Now to see if this idea is worth anything_. I opened my own menu, and navigated to our shared inventory, pumping a fist in triumph as I saw an entry that said _Rope, 14m (4)_. I quickly summoned the four inventory items and set about tying them securely together into two 28-meter ropes.

The next step was to find a suitable anchor, and I had just the thing in mind. Jagged stone formations of varying sizes and shapes jutted out of the ground like teeth, and I paced the cliffside until I found the one I wanted. It was close to the edge, and large enough to be secure but not so big around that it would waste rope. I let the loose end fall over the side of the cliff, and called down to my wife. "How high is it?"

She waded across the stream to my side and reached up to the end of the rope. She had to stretch to do it, but I saw her fingers brush the end and set it to swaying. "Two meters!" she called up. "But I can just barely reach it; it's too high for me to get a good hold and climb up."

"That's okay!" I shouted down to her. "I've got something else in mind." I looked around for a loose rock that was large enough to have the necessary mass but small enough for me to throw, and secured one end of the other rope to it.

"Agil! Diabel!" I called over. "Be ready!"

After Agil gave a thumbs-up of acknowledgment, I stepped as close as I dared to the cliff, wound up like a baseball pitcher, and threw. I'd never been on a pitcher's mound, but baseball was just as popular in Japan as it was in America, and I knew how to throw. The rock sailed through the air in a ballistic arc, trailing the rope behind it like the tail of a comet. It passed through Diabel's grasping hands and bounced between his legs, tumbling to a stop.

"Base hit!" I yelled, laughing. "Can you two hold that end while she climbs up?"

The two men needed no encouragement. Agil tied one end around his waist and planted himself while Diabel let the other end drop over the side and took position in front of Agil, grabbing the rope. They had to ease all the way up to the edge for it to dangle low enough for Camilla to grab it, but grab it she did.

"Hang on tight!" Agil yelled, and began pulling.

With their combined efforts, the rest went quickly. A wave of relief flooded over me when my wife finally reached the top, Diabel's friends rushing forward to grab her wrists and haul her the rest of the way over. I could've sworn that I saw her kiss the ground.

Now it was my turn. I looked at the rope tied to the rock on my side of the gorge and swallowed hard twice. Supposedly one conquers their fears by facing them head-on. As I stood there, I knew I was about to put that truism to the test.

A quiet chime sounded in my ear, and in my peripheral vision I caught a flashing icon indicating a new message. Grateful for the momentary distraction from the panic attack I was staving off, I swept open my menu and looked at my inbox.

There was a single message from Camilla. _I love you with all my heart. You can do this. I'll be waiting for you over here._

I raised my eyes from that window, looking across the chasm that separated us. As she gestured her own menu closed, I saw her smile and give me an encouraging nod.

I answered her smile with my own, and closed my eyes to gather my courage.

I'd never done it myself, but I'd seen video of people rappelling down a cliff before: soldiers, climbers. I was neither, but I understood the basic idea. You got your legs up between yourself and the wall, and as you kicked off a little, you'd play out the rope bit by bit in a controlled fashion. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It sounded simple. I knew it probably wasn't. And I was pretty sure we were missing some critical pieces of safety equipment.

The hardest part was making myself climb over the edge. I had to get down on my belly and slowly ease my legs over while I lowered myself hand over hand, seeking a foothold. When I finally felt one of my boots find purchase on the side of the cliff, I started lowering myself the rest of the way over.

The first attempt at rappelling was nearly the end of me. I kicked off the wall and let a little bit of rope slip—too much kick, too much slip. I jerked to a stop and smacked against the cliff wall as I frantically squeezed the rope, my legs flailing beneath me. I almost lost my grip before I could get my boots up on the wall again. Squeezing my eyes shut, I forced myself to breathe—not out of a need for oxygen, but as a calming exercise.

_It's not that far_, I told myself. _A six-story building. Five stories now. You don't even have to rappel the entire way; when you get to the bottom of the rope you can just drop. At that point it's only a man's height to the ground—you'll be fine._

That's what I told myself. When I made the mistake of looking down, the thoughts were small comfort.

After that I tried the smallest kick that I could—literally just pushing off by a few centimeters and letting about as much of the rope slip through my palms. I didn't fall or lose my balance, and it emboldened me slightly to try working up to making proper progress. By the time I was perhaps three quarters of the way down, I'd gotten into a fairly good rhythm, and had managed to keep that going by not paying attention to how far I had to go.

Confidence eventually made me sloppy, and at last I kicked out too far and tried to let out too much rope. Unable to regain my grip, I went tumbling backwards into open air, letting out a profane yell of dismay.

When I struck the water I still took falling damage, but I couldn't have been more than three or four meters off the ground and the water absorbed some of the impact. I struggled to my feet, sputtering water and fighting a numb sensation that radiated out across my back and the backs of my legs. I was fortunate that the water was barely waist-deep; it kept me from going back under more than once. Our avatars might not have needed oxygen, but this was not the time to test whether or not we could drown. I still had to stop and cling to a rock while I waited for some of the numbness to fade.

As soon as I reached the other side, I flopped onto my back and used a healing potion, waving up at the others when I saw them looking over the side of the cliff. "I'll be okay," I called up to them. "Just give me a few minutes."

When my HP gauge had finally reached full and the shock of hitting the water was gone, it was a relief to wrap the end of the rope around my waist and let someone else do the work of pulling me up. I felt strong hands grabbing my wrists, and the rest of the party let out a loud cheer as soon as I scrambled over the edge to safety.

Camilla helped me to my feet and pulled me into her arms. We were both soaking wet and trembling from the chill and the aftermath of near-death experiences, and we clung to each other for a few moments, saying nothing. Eventually she drew back, kissed me softly, and said, "That was a brilliant solution you came up with. Thank you."

"Next time," I said, "we take the train." Everyone laughed at the weak joke.

Everyone, that is, except Diabel, who wore a very unsettled expression as he held one of the pieces of rope, examining its status pop-up. "What happened?" he asked.

We explained how Agil had come across safely, but that when Camilla had gotten about halfway the moorings on my side had disintegrated in a puff of green polygons, then the ones on the other side when the dangling bridge and its passenger yanked to a stop. As each of us spoke, filling in details, Diabel's expression grew more and more troubled. "That shouldn't be possible," he murmured.

"What shouldn't?" I asked.

Rather than answering, he searched the surrounding area with his eyes until he spotted a fallen log around the same diameter as the posts. Drawing his sword, he hacked at it in an overhand swing with all his strength. Chips flew as he slashed at it again and again, the fragments disappearing into smaller puffs of green particles that in turn dissipated. The wood didn't actually seem to be getting cut through, but after a minute or two of this effort the log finally exploded into the same "death" animation that every mortal object in the system shared.

The sword slid smoothly back into its sheath as Diabel walked back and joined the group. "The bridge, obviously, is not set with an _Immortal Object_ flag. It can be destroyed—or rather, the parts that make up the whole can be individually." The proof was in the experience we'd just survived.

"But like that log," he went on, "those posts should have had more than enough base damage resistance and durability to withstand the weight of any one player at a time. The rope should've given way long before its moorings did." He tapped open the status window on one of the rope segments as he spoke, showing that even after everything we'd done the rope wasn't even down to half its durability.

I had an uncomfortable feeling I knew where this was going. From the way everyone else stirred and shifted their weight, so did they. "Diabel, what exactly are you saying?"

Camilla answered for him, her face grim. "It means that someone had to take the time to meticulously and carefully damage all four posts just enough so that the next group to cross would exhaust the remaining durability," she said tightly. "It means that someone just tried to kill us."


	13. The Pass

The only sounds that followed Camilla's pronouncement were ambient: the faint buzz of insects, an occasional bird call, and the distant murmur of the stream at the bottom of the gorge. All of us looked at each other uneasily as Camilla busied herself re-equipping all of her armor and selecting her backup weapon; her primary sword had shattered when she dropped it in the gorge.

"It wasn't us," protested one of Diabel's party members at last, a slender youth with shaggy dark blond hair and a short spear slung on his back. The other, an overweight woman with a black ponytail and a leather tunic with a short sword belted at her side, nodded quickly thereafter.

"I believe you," I said. "You helped save us, and taking out the bridge wouldn't be in your interest anyway." I glanced over to my wife to see if she disagreed, but she was busy scanning the treeline with an intent look on her face. Watching her and realizing what she was doing, I abruptly realized that we could still be in danger right now.

Diabel seemed to pick up on her intent, and shaded his eyes with one hand as he looked carefully in the other direction. "I don't see anyone," he said tentatively, "but someone could be Hiding, and I don't have the Searching skill. Anyone?"

"I do," I said. "But it's very low at this point." I wasn't sure just how much a player could get away with while using the Hiding skill, but I wasn't eager to find out the hard way. I focused for a moment, and felt the imperceptible _click_ and slight change in my vision as Searching shifted from passive to active mode. "I don't see anything out of the ordinary."

Diabel nodded, letting out a sigh and turning back to the rest of us. "I suggest you practice using it whenever you can. It'll level up much faster when it's active than passive, and the skill will be essential for avoiding traps and ambushes once we start delving into the tower dungeon. In the meantime, let's get partied up."

Taking the cue, Agil opened his menu and began manipulating it. I saw his and Camilla's HP bars disappear from my HUD as our party of three dissolved, and then received an invite pop-up from Diabel. The three of us accepted, and we found ourselves the newest members of the largest party we'd been in yet.

As we all prepared to move out, everyone throwing nervous glances towards any boulders or standing trees where an assailant might hide, Camilla stood at my side and leaned in. "We're being watched," she whispered.

"You saw something?" I activated Searching again and looked around carefully, afraid I'd missed something that she'd picked up on.

"No," she replied quietly. "But it stands to reason. Someone went to a lot of trouble to set up that trap for us. Think they wouldn't stick around to see the results?"

She had a point, and I didn't like it.

"Nothing we can do about it," she went on. "Just keep it in mind, and stay alert. We need you here now, not off in your head."

"I'm not stupid, Camilla," I said a little testily, resenting the reminder. "I get the situation we're in."

My wife patted me on the shoulder affectionately. "I know. But it had to be said once; we can't afford any mistakes. I'm dropping it now. Let's go, or we'll get left behind."

At Diabel's urging, I made a point of toggling on Searching periodically as we walked, especially when we approached anything that looked like it offered a potential ambush spot, or when the treeline came too close to the path. Eventually the road itself started to peter out, the dirt path yielding to irregular clumps of grass that occasionally made it difficult to tell if we were still on track. No NPC traffic seemed to come this way, and we hadn't seen any other players since crossing the gorge.

"That is so creepy," Camilla said at one point after I'd finished scanning a pair of boulders that straddled the path ahead.

"What is?"

"Your eyes when you do that."

"Do wha—" And then I realized the context. "Oh, you mean you can tell?"

"Yeah, your eyes get this weird greenish tint all over when you toggle that on. It's kinda creepy."

"Green isn't my color," I replied, making a note of the fact that switching the skill to active left a visible sign. "Clear," I called out to Diabel, hoping it really was.

I had to admit it was a really handy skill to have, and I'd picked it both to keep Camilla and I from getting ambushed by mobs and because it seemed like at least one of us should have it, and I was the designated bearer of utility skills. Aside from giving us some peace of mind at the moment, it was helping us grind, too—it let me see the cursors of mobs from much further away if they weren't too much higher than me in level, even if something blocked my line of sight to them. Our progress through the mountains slowed noticeably, but we began gaining EXP much more quickly. And much of that could be traced directly to the effective leadership of our party.

Camilla and I were veterans of more than ten years in MMORPGs, so it was nothing new to us that every party, every group of players, was a very different experience—not only in terms of personality mix, but in terms of teamwork and effectiveness. The group we'd shared with Kibaou and the others had been a tense affair interspersed with moments of humor, with only the fact that we were all relatively skilled players keeping us going.

Diabel's group, on the other hand, maintained a very serious, businesslike atmosphere—almost like a squad of soldiers rather than a group of players. It wasn't that the other two members he'd brought with him were that disciplined—they fought well and with great courage, but from what little conversation we had it sounded like they'd been casual players before being trapped in SAO.

It was Diabel's leadership that brought them together as a cohesive unit. During battle he would call out orders, and he expected them to be obeyed—not, we noticed, because he seemed to have any kind of power complex, but because he gave sensible orders that made battles go more swiftly and safely.

He reminded me of some of the more effective raid leaders we'd had over the years, and once he had a grasp of each of our capabilities he used them to their fullest. Our pride wasn't hurt by being ordered around in this way; it was like being back in a guild.

Outside of battle, however, he was… not cold, not distant, but _efficient_. He would smile and engage in good-natured discussions about the game and our plans ahead if someone else engaged him, but for the most part he kept his attention on his surroundings and didn't prolong such conversations. Even Camilla, who generally shared Diabel's no-nonsense tendencies when in a combat situation, mentioned in an aside to me at one point that she found it a little off-putting.

But neither of us could really argue with the results—and when it all came down to it, we weren't on a weekend camping trip here. Diabel's attitude was hardly unreasonable. I wondered how much of it had to do with having been a beta tester, and if part of his reticence came from a desire to avoid the kind of slips that had revealed that fact to us.

By nightfall we'd nearly reached the peak of the pass that wound through the mountains, and the temperature was dropping. Diabel called a halt to the party as we approached a large rock outcropping a short distance off the path that would provide some cover in case the weather took a bad turn.

"Kadyn." It was a measure of his leadership and how long we'd been drilling at this today that by this point hearing my name was enough of a cue. I activated my Searching skill and slowly panned my gaze in a circle. Raising my arm, I pointed off to the east into the dense bank of pine trees. "Several Alpine Wolf roamers about fifty-five meters that way. Can't tell what their pathing is but they're a little below my level—chances are they won't bother us unless we aggro them, and we can handle it if they do." A pause while I glanced around once more, and then: "Nothing else that I can detect."

Diabel clapped a hand on my shoulder. "Well done. Everyone, listen up! We'll camp for the night below that outcropping. Tents in a semicircle with space in the middle for a fire. Niara, you're on firewood duty. Torik, take first watch."

Camilla and I looked at each other, both of us mildly amused. "Firewood?" she said.

Diabel caught the implied question, and turned to explain. "It's unlikely that it'll get cold enough up here for our HP to drop, especially since we all brought camping gear. But comfort matters too, it'll let Niara cook, and it'll discourage most animal-type roamers from approaching the camp."

"Oh, I get the idea," my wife replied. "I just think it's funny that the system not only has resource nodes that take the form of deadfall which can be picked up as objects, but has code for using the gathers as consumables for generating a 'campfire' object that emits useful heat. That bastard thought of everything." Nobody had to elaborate on who _that bastard_ was.

Diabel cracked a smile. "Not your first MMO." It was as close as he'd ever come to inquiring about our lives before SAO.

We both laughed. "Not by a long shot."

He nodded as if that was no surprise at all, and then jerked his head towards the budding campsite: back to business. "Come on."

Within minutes we had our tents erected and sleeping bags placed within. It had been significantly simpler than any time I'd ever gone camping in the real world: I opened our inventory, selected _Use_ on the pop-up for the tent, and held my hand on the ground where I wanted to place the _Small_ _Tent_ object.

A progress indicator appeared, and after about ten seconds a wireframe rendering of the tent we'd bought appeared. When I stepped out of its clipping radius, it became solid. The sleeping bag was even simpler: I summoned it from my inventory as a bundle, and rolled it out inside the tent the way I would've if it had been a real one.

The inventory and item systems of SAO made so many things much quicker and easier. Getting dressed and undressed, storing and carrying items, equipping and unequipping armor and weapons... all of these things usually took a fraction of the time to do that they would've in the real world, and with a fraction of the effort. The tent was a good example: I'd been given the task of setting up a tent on a camping trip before, and it was a _major_ pain in the ass, especially without an extra pair of hands.

Another example presented itself when Niara returned from gathering duty. I thought at first she'd come back empty-handed until she opened her menu and summoned a stack of firewood from her inventory, which appeared at her feet. She withdrew another item and tapped to bring up its options, then touched a glowing fingertip to the stack of firewood. A few logs shimmered and broke into particles, which reformed as a campfire that began shedding welcome heat and light immediately.

We didn't know how long we were going to be trapped in this world, and we had little choice but to get used to using these interfaces. It was tempting to learn to _like_ the ease of use, to get used to relying on it. Yet for all the convenience, I couldn't help but think that the experience lost something in the process. The feel of gathering up an armful of different twigs and logs, feeling the bark against your skin and the challenge of balancing the stack on your way back. The art of selecting the right pieces of wood and building the fire, the rush of satisfaction as the kindling caught and the fun of blowing on the embers to encourage the blaze to grow.

We all gathered around the fire, warming ourselves and letting the tension of the day seep out of us. Niara turned out to have the Cooking skill, and with some of the crafting ingredients we'd gotten as drops she started working on improving our basic rations. One at a time she touched a Cooking Knife to the ingredients, and I watched in amazement as the base objects faded and were replaced by chunks that looked like the end result of several minutes of chopping. A couple minutes of manipulating option menus and pop-ups yielded something that smelled like a rich, savory soup, which everyone dug into with relish and effusive gratitude.

It smelled mouth-watering, especially compared to the fare we'd been eating while out hunting. But again, I was struck with a note of sadness and disappointment at the process that I couldn't quite pinpoint. Perhaps it'd be different when I was the one doing the crafting—these things were never as much fun to watch as they were to do yourself—but it seemed like the cooking process did away with a few thousand years of culinary complexity, replacing it with a lot of pointing and clicking.

That was the problem with the simplicity and convenience of doing anything ordinary in SAO: it was life reduced to a series of dialog windows.

Camilla's nudge in the ribs brought me back out of my thoughts. "Forest Elves?" she asked quietly, the light of the campfire leaving half of her face in shadow.

"Forest Elves," I confirmed a little sheepishly, leaning against her. "Just thinking about how simple everything that isn't combat-related is in SAO. Tap an item, open a menu, select an option. Poof, done."

"Kinda boring," she admitted.

"That's kind of where my train of thought was going." I replied. "In some ways, it's such a rich, realistically simulated world. And to be honest, if it were just a game I don't think it'd bother me—the whole point of that aspect of game design is to abstract mundane tasks in a way that turns them into a game mechanic."

"I think I see what you're getting at."

I nodded, finishing my soup and scraping the bowl with a piece of bread. "We live here now. It's the last thing we see before we go to sleep; it's the first thing we see when we wake up. It's our reality. If we make cookies, there are no beaters or mixing bowls to lick. No one will ever have to develop the skill sets needed to pitch a tent or make efficient use of space in a backpack. It's life… but it's a very hollow life."

Camilla looked at me thoughtfully as I spoke, and when I finished she held my gaze for a minute without saying anything. Finally, she reached up and poked me lightly in the nose, as if pushing a button on an invisible menu or trying to bring up a status window. "Beep," she said.

"That's not how you turn me on," I quipped.

"We'll see," she said with a smile. More seriously: "That's one of the things I've always loved about you, Kadyn. You think about things like that, about the bigger picture and the meaning beyond the _now_."

"Hm," I said, pleased but not really sure what to add. "Good thing I have you, then, to keep me grounded in the _now_."

As she started to lean towards me, I heard the tinny metallic sound of eating utensils being tapped together like a bell being rung. Diabel rose to his feet, and when he had everyone's attention he began to speak.

"Niara, thank you for that meal. It's times like this I don't mind that you picked up Cooking rather than Searching." It was obviously intended as a good-natured joke; everyone laughed. Niara blushed. She wasn't especially pretty when compared to Camilla; her nose was too wide for her face and she had a double chin that went with the rest of her somewhat dumpy physique—but her smile was almost as radiant as the campfire. A good smile, I'd often thought, could make up for a lot.

Diabel went on, addressing the entire group. "You all did very well today. We fought together effectively as a team, and none of us ever had our HP drop into the yellow zone. That's the sign of a solid party." _And a solid leader_, I thought. But another sign of a good leader, I knew, was giving the credit to those he led instead of taking it for himself.

"Starting tomorrow things will get much more difficult. When we reach the other side of this pass, the path will all but disappear and we'll find ourselves in series of dense, forested valleys peppered with ruins in various states of disrepair. These ruins are not abandoned—they mark the beginning of _Ruin Kobold_ territory. I urge you all to study the most recent edition of the game guide if you haven't yet; it contains critical information on some of the mobs and locations we're bound to encounter there."

Agil raised his hand. Diabel nodded towards him. "Yes?"

"You said that the path will all but disappear. How will we find our way without getting lost?"

"A good question," Diabel acknowledged with another nod and a magnanimous gesture. "Our best bet is to use the tower leading to the 2nd floor as a landmark—that is, after all, our ultimate goal. Anytime we can find a clearing in the trees, even a small one, we should be able to see the tower in the distance. We should get in the habit of using it often to check our bearings." He was right, I realized—there had almost never been a time, regardless of where we were in the world, when we couldn't see that tower off in the distance, rising until it met the underside of the 2nd floor.

Agil seemed satisfied with this answer, sitting back and nodding. But Diabel wasn't finished.

"Even so, I must caution you that we will likely be fighting every step of the way. With no path to follow, we won't be making the kind of time that we made getting here. It could take weeks. We should be prepared for that possibility. According to the guide, there are other towns that we'll find somewhere on the other side where we can resupply and recover… but finding them may be a matter of luck."

"Sounds like we're going to be doing a lot of grinding," I commented.

Diabel inclined his head. "Doubtlessly we'll all level up in the process. I'm sure you've noticed that our leveling has slowed significantly after the first few we gained."

Indeed it had. Like most games, the first few levels in SAO went quickly, designed to draw players in by initially offering a quick payoff for their efforts. But the leveling curve in this game rose sharply; after level 5 it had dramatically slowed down as we started getting less and less EXP from the monsters in the areas we were hunting. Getting into a new area should help with that; from the sounds of it, we were going to need every edge we could get.

"Anyway," Diabel concluded with a clap of the hands, "enough speechifying from me. Again, great job out there today. Let's all get some rest so we can start again at daybreak. I'll take the next watch. Niara, you'll be after me. Then Agil, Camilla and Kadyn, in that order."

As Camilla and I crawled into our sleeping bag together, grateful to not have the middle watch, I found my thoughts drifting unavoidably to the days ahead of us. Apparently I wasn't the only one, because after we finished getting settled in each other's arms, I heard Camilla's soft voice in my ear. "'Weeks'," she said, quoting Diabel.

"Weeks," I echoed. "I hope you packed your toothbrush."


	14. Wipe

Diabel hadn't been kidding. The path actually started fading when we were about halfway down the mountain, narrowing and getting more and more interspersed with obstacles until you could ask three different people and get four different opinions about whether or not we were still on it. The branches of the trees to either side reached toward each other until they met and merged, the thick canopy of pine needles blocking out most direct sunlight aside from the pinpricks of thousands of sunbeams piercing the gaps as if the light was pouring through a fine mesh sieve.

It was the work of several days just to get to where the terrain started flattening out, days which were filled with some of the most appallingly repetitive grinding imaginable. I got so sick of seeing and fighting animal mobs that I didn't even want to look at their component drops in my inventory, and there were times I was tempted to lie about what I'd seen with my Searching skill if it meant not having to pull yet another wolf that we'd otherwise bypass. It didn't matter what was prefixed before its name or what kind of palette swap was supposed to somehow make it fresh—they all fought the same, more or less, and at that point we probably could've done it in our sleep.

Most of us leveled up at least once on the way, and at that point diminishing returns kicked in for the EXP we got from the animals around that level. We didn't see any named or rare monsters the entire way down, and the growing ease of burning through these trash mobs took its toll on our fighting edge. Discipline slipped, and even Diabel was hard-pressed to maintain his stoicism when we were on a long hike with no detectable threats.

My wife, being far more sociable than me, spent a lot of time chatting with some of the other party members in between pulls. With Diabel she talked about strategy and tanking. With Agil they talked largely about living as foreigners in Japan, although they kept that quiet after Diabel mentioned that it was making people homesick. With Niara… actually, I had no idea what she and Niara talked about. They would hang back from the rest of the group when Camilla wasn't on point, their conversations muted and occasionally even whispered, words swallowed by the sounds of forest life around us. When I looked back at her once after a particularly lengthy bout of whispering, the two broke out into furious giggling.

When Diabel called Niara for point duty, I heard my wife's footsteps coming up behind me. I decided I had to ask while I had the chance. "Okay, spill. What was that all about?"

Camilla took my arm as we fell into step. "Girl stuff. You wouldn't understand."

My eyes rolled so far back into my head I thought they were going to get stuck there. "Oh, don't give me that crap. You've known me far too long to think that's even remotely true. No secrets." I prodded her in the arm.

"Mm. Well. Promise not to laugh, or for that matter react in any audible way."

This had to be good. "Promise." I held up a hand, pinky crooked.

Camilla's eyes flitted from person to person as she made sure no one was near and that Niara was preoccupied with her new task. "She wanted to know if you and I had ever tried turning off the Ethics Code."

Keeping my promise not to react audibly suddenly became very difficult. My wife and I had never been shy about physical affection with each other, and although we were keeping things quiet while we were camping in close quarters with so many strangers… those sleeping bags were awfully cozy, and intended for one person. It was hardly any kind of secret that we were a couple, and people could put two and two together just fine.

"And?" I asked finally, overcoming my desire to laugh. "Did you give her a running count or just settle for 'yes'?"

Camilla snorted. "She wanted to know what it was like. From what she said, I got the impression she's been wanting to ask Torik to sleep with her, but doesn't think Diabel would approve of the distraction while we're all out on safari."

"Probably not. So of course you told her anyway."

Camilla's expression was devious. "Hell yes I told her. In loving detail. All the way down to a joke about how there was no way to tell someone's natural hair color in SAO because—"

I chopped at my throat with the edge of my hand to cut her off, fighting to keep my composure. "If you don't want me to laugh, that would be the place to stop."

"I'm stopping, I'm stopping. Anyway, she's been so gloomy the last few days that I wanted to make her laugh… and maybe even encourage her to do something that'd make her happy and take her mind off of our situation. Regardless of what Diabel thinks about it—and I don't think he's actually said anything, it's just her being oversensitive—it's none of his business, as long as she has her head on straight when we're fighting."

I tried to look severe, and failed miserably. I had to settle for wagging my finger, which she tried to grab. "You are very naughty," I said as I freed the offending digit, "and a bad influence."

Camilla simply nodded with a satisfied look, as if I'd paid her a compliment by stating the obvious. "You're being paged."

At first it was such a non sequitur that her meaning didn't penetrate. Then Diabel called my name, and I realized it wasn't the first time he'd done so. Flushing a little, I jogged towards the front of the party.

"Problems?" Diabel asked neutrally when I caught up.

"Marital discussion," I replied, already toggling Searching into active mode and scanning the wilderness. The foliage had become dense, blocking clear visibility for more than a few meters in most places; we were going to need the skill. "Nothing to be concerned with. That goes for what's immediately ahead, too."

Nodding thoughtfully, Diabel kept looking around as if he thought perhaps I'd missed something. He didn't ask the group to move on yet, his head cocked slightly. The expression on his face struck me as more than a little troubled.

"What's eating at you?" I asked, starting to be genuinely worried. It wasn't like him, at least that we'd seen so far.

Diabel didn't answer for a few seconds. "I thought I heard combat," he said finally, a little frustration coming through in his tone. "But I couldn't place the direction or distance."

"It's probably another group," I pointed out as I scanned again. "I doubt we're the only ones out here. I'd be surprised if we were even the first over the pass."

Diabel's casual nod said that he'd had the same thought. "I need you up here now," he said. "Take point with Niara and keep your attention on what's ahead. I want as much warning as possible so that we don't walk right into an encounter."

Like so many of the decisions Diabel had made thus far, it turned out to be a good call. It couldn't have been more than a minute or two before I picked up the distant cursors of a large number of aggro mobs—and those of quite a few players as well. My Searching skill had been gradually improving in effectiveness and range over the last few days; it was much too far still to be sure of their exact number or circumstances, but I relayed the information to our leader as soon as I was certain of what I was seeing.

His reaction was immediate. "Weapons!" he called out, drawing his own. "There's a fight ahead and we're going to check it out. Someone might need help."

We double-timed it towards the conflict, those of our group with blades at the forefront hacking away at the underbrush to clear the way for the others. Showers of sparkling green rained down on those behind us as severed branches burst and disintegrated. It wasn't long before it was unnecessary for me to use Searching; the sounds of animalistic barks, clashing weapons and occasionally the shrill tinkle of shattering glass reached our ears and we broke into a full-out run, my high Agility carrying me ahead of the main group.

When I burst through the treeline at last, I wasn't prepared for it. One moment I was slashing with my dagger at a particularly thick mess of brambles, the next I'd stumbled into the open and almost went tumbling down a steep embankment that looked over some kind of ruined temple of muted orange stone. The architecture seemed to be an imitation of a Greek or Roman style, with a collapsed roof and tall carved columns that varied in height only because each of them had decayed in different ways. A pavement of fitted slate tiles lined a massive open courtyard that was sunk about a meter deep in the ground at the bottom of several steps, a crumbling stone dais in the center.

In that courtyard, a battle was raging.

The others broke through just behind me, and I spread out my arms to discourage anyone else from taking the tumble down the slope that I almost had. We could all clearly see the horrendously one-sided fight, and I feared we were much too far away to affect the outcome.

A single swordsman stood against a named Ruin Kobold with close to a dozen adds, a simple leather overcoat making up the majority of the protection he wore. In his hands a gleaming dark blade danced as he leapt from target to target, deflecting blows with a speed I couldn't even follow with my eyes and landing follow-up techniques in the openings his parries created, as if he was part of a team and performing his own switch-in maneuvers to take advantage of the openings he created himself.

Three Kobolds vanished in a spray of particles as we watched, and when I focused on the swordsman the quarter-circle of his HP gauge sprang up around his head. Although he was moving too quickly for me to be sure of how much damage he'd taken the color of the gauge was still green, so he couldn't be below half.

"Aren't we going to help him?" Torik asked urgently. The odds were not in the lone swordsman's favor, and one false move would be the end of him against that many foes, no matter how trivial he might currently be making them look.

"Hey," Camilla said suddenly, the awe she'd been showing at the swordsman's spectacular performance giving way to recognition. She elbowed me to get my attention. "It's that kid!"

I hadn't recognized him because of the coat, but as soon as she spoke I knew exactly who my wife meant. The boy from Horunka with the sword she'd coveted; that was the blade that was currently making short work of the band of Kobolds he faced.

"Come on!" Diabel said finally, leveling his sword at the battle below as if he was aiming at a target. "Torik's right; we should at least get close enough to be of some help if the battle goes badly for him."

As we rushed down the grassy embankment and vaulted the fallen pillars that blocked our path, though, it became clear enough that our concern was unnecessary. By the time we'd set foot on the tiles of the sunken courtyard, the battle was all but done. The boy with the sword—and the closer we got, the clearer it became that yes, he was a _boy_, not a man—had diced through the howling mass of lesser Kobolds and whittled down his opponents to the named in heavy armor and one of its adds. He stood in the middle of the two mobs, his sword flashing from one side to the other in a dark blur as he parried or blocked almost every attack that rained down on him.

Ripsnarl the Sly—the named Kobold that was the biggest threat in the battle—raised its arms above its head and spun a massive quarterstaff that was as thick as a man's arm, the motion and the resulting glow from its weapon signaling a charging technique. I saw the ghost of a smile touch the boy's face as it did, and he shifted his stance. When the named unleashed its attack, its add executed a technique at the same time, trapping their prey in between.

The boy spun on one heel, parrying the add's strike and pirouetting around to the back of the mob. The powerful overhand swing that the named had used exploded into its own comrade, obliterating the add and obscuring our view of the boy in a curtain of twinkling greenish light. A moment later, a human form burst through that polygonal veil in a screaming leap, his weapon trailing a streak of light as he took advantage of the long recovery time of the attack he'd just avoided. A four-hit combo slashed into the named, depleting its second and final HP bar as the boy's blade drew a glowing red square on his target's body.

All of us were dead silent as the boy—no, I realized now, it was unfair to call him anything but a true swordsman—landed in a crouch on the tile floor in the midst of the mob's massive exploding death animation, not even bothering to look back at it. He rose to his feet and sheathed his sword with a flourish that had the practiced look of pure habit.

Applause broke out in the party. The young warrior froze, a look like a caged animal flickering across his face, as if he hadn't been aware of our presence until that moment. Given the concentration it must have taken to prevail in that battle, I wasn't surprised he'd been oblivious to anything but his immediate surroundings.

"Masterfully done," Diabel said, clapping with as much vigor as anyone else as he walked forward. "We heard the battle from a distance and came to render assistance, but I see there was no need."

Something that looked almost like pain touched the boy's features, and was gone just as quickly. "Wrong," he said quietly. "You were too late."

By that point the clapping had died down and we'd all drawn close enough to hear the softly spoken reply. I could see confusion rippling through our party. "You seemed like you were doing just fine," Camilla said dryly, planting a fist on one hip. "More than fine, really—my God, I don't think I've ever seen anyone move that fast or solo that many mobs at once."

"Not too late for me," the black-haired youth said as his gaze panned across the ground surrounding him. "For them."

All eyes followed his to the ground. It was Diabel who reacted first, a short choking sound in his throat. My wife was next, a sharply indrawn breath covered quickly by one hand.

When you killed a mob, anything it was wearing or wielding disappeared with it, and any drops that were awarded would appear as an item in the _Results_ window for the person who received the drop. From what we'd been told, most of the time when a player died the same was true—but anything that wasn't in their grasp at the time of their death would remain in the world.

The ground was littered with weapons. More than half a dozen of them, at least. I had stopped counting.

"A raid?" Camilla asked, her voice small.

The swordsman nodded. "Two groups. They must have pulled the named, thinking it an easy target by itself, and when they did it triggered the ring event at this temple." A ring event was a type of unmarked quest that usually involved fighting multiple waves of monsters until you satisfied the condition for completing the event. The usual condition was simple: _survive every wave_.

"Ripsnarl the Sly has a disarm attack," the swordsman explained. "I got here not long before you did, and by then most of them were already dead."

We all looked around again at the fallen weapons that were the only thing that remained in this world of the people who'd dropped them. A sword stuck out of a crack in the slate tiles of the floor as if marking a grave. Ten or more lives, extinguished forever. No one would even know their names.

My wife stepped forward and introduced herself, bowing. "I'm truly sorry," she said gently. "I wish we'd gotten here sooner."

Dark eyes fixed themselves on her from behind locks of raven-black hair. He hesitated, as if weighing whether to offer his name in return. "Kirito," he said finally. "And don't. If you had," he said evenly, "your weapons would probably be lying here too. Better not to throw your lives away."

Diabel had been silent most of this time, rubbing his chin with a sad and thoughtful look on his face. When Kirito identified himself, though, his gaze snapped towards the young swordsman and locked itself there. He seemed about to speak, lips parting soundlessly, but then stopped.

Nobody said anything. The youth drew his sword and checked its durability before sliding it back into its scabbard. "You know," Diabel said cautiously, "we could really use someone with your level of skill. We could start building a second group and push forward much harder, perhaps even reach Tolbana in a week."

"Sorry," Kirito said, turning his back on us both literally and figuratively. "I only play solo."

"Why?" Diabel pleaded in earnest as Kirito slowly walked away. "In a party, your skills could save lives and help prevent tragedies like this. Do you not feel any sense of obligation towards the thousands in the Starting City who will never have your strength, who can't fight to free themselves from this world? Or to those who fight on anyway, knowing that it could mean their deaths?"

Kirito stopped walking, and stood twenty paces away at the edge of the courtyard with one foot on the first step. From behind, it was impossible to guess at what might be going through his head as he paused there in the silence that stretched on after Diabel stopped speaking.

"You can have whatever they left on the ground," he said finally as he mounted the steps and kept walking, his voice detached. "I don't want any of it."


	15. Haven

In the end, nobody took any of the weapons left behind by the doomed raid group. One of the swords might have been an upgrade for Camilla, but she didn't even look at its status window and I didn't bother suggesting it. By unspoken agreement, one by one we moved the weapons to the edge of the courtyard, planting or standing them upright so that they stood as mute testimony to the lives and deaths of their previous owners—and as a warning not to approach the dais where the named must have spawned. The durability of the weapons would gradually decay while out in the game world like this, but they would at least remain for a time. Perhaps long enough to matter.

"We should get word of this back to the rest of the player base," I suggested as I carefully twisted the haft of a spear to drill it into the soil beneath a shattered tile. "I'm pretty sure this ring event isn't in the game guide, and getting it in there might save other parties from a wipe like that."

Diabel nodded, his face still pained. "Good idea. Do any of you have Argo friended?" Each of us shook our heads in turn, drawing a sigh from him. "It's going to have to wait, then. When you have a chance, send a message to anyone on your friends list that you think might be able to pass along the warning."

We all stood in a loose huddle in front of the makeshift memorial once our task was completed, occasionally looking at each other as if each person was waiting for someone else to be the first to speak. Camilla rested her hand on the pommel of a war hammer that stood upright on the flat top of the business end, and I reached out to lay my hand on top of hers.

Finally, Agil spoke up, his deep voice breaking the uncomfortable silence. "Does anyone want to say any words?"

After a moment's pause, Diabel nodded and stepped forward, bowing his head. "_Kami-sama_, as the souls of these players return to your embrace, grant them the freedom and peace that they sought to bring to others in this world. Take from them the fear of their last moments and let their courage serve as an inspiration for us to push forward with renewed determination, so that their deaths will not have been without meaning or purpose."

Niara was sniffling by the time Diabel had finished speaking, and both Agil and Torik had their heads bowed in respect. I knew Camilla had little patience for what she regarded as "superstitious claptrap", but if she was having such thoughts they were not reflected on her face or in the wet redness of her eyes. The religious content of the eulogy was lost on me, but I bowed my head all the same and listened respectfully. At times like that it was tempting to give in to the comforting thought that something else waited beyond death, something that would give meaning to the meaningless crime against humanity that left us all prisoners in Aincrad.

At last, Diabel let out a heavy sigh and looked as if he was composing himself. "All right, let's get moving. We don't want to still be standing here when mobs start respawning."

Everyone recognized the wisdom of the suggestion, and one by one pulled themselves out of whatever thoughts had consumed them while we bade farewell to the unknown raid group that had perished here. Diabel took a moment to look up at the dungeon tower in the distance where it rose up to meet the 2nd floor. It was noticeably closer than it had been before we descended into the forest, but still impossibly out of reach. Reminded of the landmark we were using to navigate, I took the opportunity to fix the bearing in my head and pulled up my area map so that I could associate it with my surroundings.

We reentered the forest in silence, disappearing into the underbrush. Haunted by the scene we'd just left, I forced it out of my thoughts by focusing on scanning around with my Searching skill, the concentration necessary to keep it almost constantly active preventing me from dwelling on what had happened. It made the journey pass painfully slowly, my unceasing awareness of every living thing around us acting like the proverbial watched pot that never boils and dragging out the hours.

By the next day the weather had begun to worsen, overcast skies eliminating what few sunbeams made it through the forest canopy and leaving us in a kind of perpetual twilight. Our sense of connection with the world outside of the forest faded, and even day and night began to lose much of their distinction, the approach of nightfall becoming obvious only when it grew so dark that we could barely see the person in front of us. Only the digital clocks in our system menus gave any hint to the passage of time, and we counted the days that followed largely in terms of how many times we camped and how many battles we fought. Most of the animal mobs were far enough below our current level that they avoided us, but once in a while a patrol of Ruin Kobolds would give battle, or we'd stumble across one of their scouts and have to run it down before it brought back adds.

By the end of the second week, our supplies were getting low and every one of us was on their last nerve. Bickering broke out occasionally over which direction to go or whether or not to pull a mob, and although Diabel seemed to be as weary as any of us, he stepped in at those times with firm words and reassurance to keep order from breaking down. Even Camilla and I were growing short with each other from time to time, and we ended up not speaking to each other for most of a day because it was preferable to the risk of triggering a pointless argument. The cohesion of our group was unraveling slowly under the pressure.

We hadn't seen the lone swordsman since the encounter at the ruined temple, and had only occasionally come across other groups. If they were fewer in number than us, they usually fled, presumably wary of PKers; if equal, they either ignored us or moved on after exchanging a few curt words or vague warnings. So far it seemed as if Diabel's sense of duty was far from commonplace—everyone was out for themselves, or at best for their own party.

It was disheartening, to say the least. But not particularly surprising.

At long last, when our party felt like it was on the verge of disintegrating, we found our first town. One moment my Searching skill returned nothing but forest and non-aggro animal mobs, the next I caught the telltale cursors of NPCs at the far edge of my detection radius. The news passed through everyone like a shockwave, and without being told we all began sprinting in that direction, heedless of anything else in our path.

The fact that I detected NPCs didn't necessarily mean a town—it could, after all, have been quest givers of one sort or another, perhaps even a trap. But when the system message appeared at the top of my vision—_Safe Zone: Town of Yakuld—_it wasthe first moment that I allowed myself to truly believe it. Despite the pouring rain, Niara sank to her knees and pressed her forehead to the muddy ground, sobs suddenly wracking her body as the pressure and stress of the past weeks rushed out of her all at once, leaving her hollow. Torik knelt beside her and gently touched her arm, at which point she sat up and collapsed against his chest, clinging to him and sobbing even harder as he knelt there with a bewildered expression on his face, her black hair plastered wetly against the crook of his neck.

Camilla and I embraced as well, relief trembling through us as we held each other tightly for a moment. Agil closed his eyes and tilted his head back with a serene smile, the rain running down his dark skin as if it was washing away the journey that had led us here.

Diabel stood silently by, a smile finally coming to his face for the first time in many days as he gave the rest of us the time we needed to vent our sense of relief in our own individual ways. When Niara's tears had subsided and my wife and I turned away from each other to face our leader, he nodded to each of us in acknowledgment of our hardships. "I know. It's been a long road getting here and these recent days have been pretty awful. You've all held up better than anyone had a right to expect. But we're safe now. We can resupply, get our equipment repaired, sell off our vendor trash and maybe even sleep in a real bed tonight." My eyes swam with my own tears at the thought of sliding underneath actual sheets and sleeping for at least two days. Maybe three.

"Come on, everyone," Diabel said, extending his hands to help Torik and Niara to their feet. "Let's find an inn so we can get warm and dry."

On our way into town we'd only seen a tiny handful of players, most of them waiting to get their equipment repaired at the town's single NPC smith, a few going in or out of the item shop. Vendoring loot could wait—right now, Diabel was right; what we needed more than anything else was to get out of the rain and in front of a fire, order a hot drink and let go of our troubles.

The inn was small, but so was the population of players in the town. Only a dozen or so in total were there to look up from their meals as we entered the common room, and none of them looked particularly happy to have company. There was no open hostility, but no one spoke up to welcome us or congratulate us for getting this far, nor did anyone engage us to offer trade items or map data. It was as diametrically opposite as you could get from the celebratory mood that we'd left in Horunka weeks prior.

"Well what the hell?" Camilla muttered aside to me. She wasn't speaking loudly, but she wasn't whispering either, and the murmur of low conversations was sparse enough in the common room that her words carried more than she might've intended. "Did we miss the funeral quest?"

What little conversation there'd been died off abruptly, although no one said anything in reply. There was an uncomfortable silence, and more than a few unfriendly looks were directed our way.

"Poor choice of words, I suspect," Diabel remarked to her mildly after a few moments of this. "Let's get our rooms."

There were only three rooms open, but as it turned out that was enough. Diabel and Agil agreed to share, and although neither had said anything since the scene at the edge of town, Torik and Niara rented a room and retreated to it at once. Camilla gave me a smug look like a cat who'd gotten the cream as they trucked wearily up the stairs together, which I pretended to ignore as I rented out the last room for the two of us.

Struck by a thought, I asked the NPC innkeeper if he had the latest news sheet.

"Of course, sir. News travels slowly in our little corner of Aincrad, but we've had many new travelers recently and they've brought with them news of the outside world." I translated that mentally from in-character NPC dialogue into game mechanics: _once a certain number players reached this town, it unlocked the news sheets for purchase here_.

"I'll take one, please." I tapped the air to confirm the purchase pop-up, spending a completely token amount of col and accepting the item to my inventory. "Also, do you have hot chocolate?"

The NPC, wearing the appearance of a middle-aged man in work-stained overalls that might have never seen a washboard in their entire existence, shook his head in what must have been a precisely defined animation. "I'm afraid not, sir. We have black tea and an excellent sake that will warm you just as well, though."

Agil had already gone upstairs, and Diabel had seated himself with a steaming cup of sake and a bowl of thin soup, reading a copy of the same news sheet we'd just bought with a grim look on his face. We ordered two teas and carried them carefully upstairs, leaving the funerary atmosphere of the common room behind.

As soon as the door locked behind us we quickly unequipped all of our armor, along with the soaked-through clothing that still chilled us through and through. As I tapped the control pop-up for the wood-burning stove in the center of the room to activate it, Camilla dragged one of the blankets from the bed and wrapped it around herself like a cape as she sank cross-legged to the floor in front of the stove.

"Hey," I said gently as I sat down beside her and lifted the edge of the blanket. "Share."

Her reply was testy, but there was no heat in it. "So get in here before you let out all the nice warm air I've got trapped."

By the time she finished speaking I was already leaning against her and wrapping the blanket back around us, shivers subsiding as I tucked the edges of the blanket under my legs anywhere I felt a draft. Within minutes we had warmed up enough for me to venture a bare arm outside of the blanket, the heat of the wood stove radiant on my skin as I opened my inventory and summoned the news sheet.

We could've found out the date by looking in our system menus, but there was something that felt more real about seeing it on the printed sheet of virtual paper before us: _23 November, 2022._

"Seventeen days," I said tightly after taking a moment to subtract the date of the launch. "We've been in here for two and a half weeks now."

I felt Camilla jerk suddenly beside me. "That's not the worst number on this page," she said, her voice a low whisper. She touched a point on the sheet, and I read the number beside her fingertip: _1,692_.

"That can't…" I reached over and pushed her finger aside. The words that followed that hateful number confirmed my worst fears. In less than three weeks, almost seventeen hundred players had died. I felt goose bumps prick up on Camilla's skin where we leaned against each other, and I knew from the chill that ran through me that she was probably feeling the same from my skin. My mind was briefly struck with the random thought of how absurd it was for the system to simulate that reflex as an emotional response when our avatars had no body hairs to make it happen. It was a better side track than dwelling on the mind-numbing number of deaths that stared out at us in bold print.

I kept reading despite myself. Almost three weeks, and no one had even reached the tower dungeon—or if they had, they weren't saying. No one had even reached the town of Tolbana that Diabel had mentioned earlier, the last town before the dungeon.

Not a single person had reached that dungeon, let alone _cleared_ it, and—against my better judgment I did the math—even assuming not one more player died before clearing this first floor, at this rate there would be no one left before we even reached the 7th floor.

I was suddenly very, very cold despite the blanket, stove and the body of the lover beside me. "We're going to die here," I asked quietly, my tone hollow with growing despair. "Aren't we?"

I felt Camilla's arm tighten around my shoulders, trembling. What I wanted from her was empty, rote reassurance. I wanted her to assure me that no, we were not going to die, that this was just the cost of unfamiliarity with a new game world, and that once the fools and casual players were weeded out the death rate would slow and we would start making progress. I wanted to know that the hell we'd gone through over the last few weeks hadn't been pointless. That it wasn't just a march towards the end.

Instead she simply said, with the voice of a girl who'd lost her way and wanted a friendly stranger to tell her where she needed to go: "I don't know, Kadyn. Maybe."

I closed my eyes and let the news sheet flutter to the floor; neither of us were looking at it anymore. My wife was my haven, my foundation. Whenever my mind threatened to wander afield, whenever I felt lost, she brought me back. There might, as she'd said days before, be something she loved about the brooding introspection in which I spent so much time… but there was weakness too, and we shored up each other's weaknesses when we needed to. It was part of what made us so good together. I was the sky, she was the earth.

I didn't know what to do when the earth fell away from under my feet.

I felt her lean her weight on my shoulder, felt wet tears fall on the skin there as her hair cascaded down and hid her face from me behind a curtain of red. Almost immediately she sat back up, wiping at her face and turning away so that I wouldn't see. "I'm sorry, Kadyn, I don't mean—"

I reached over and laid my palm against her cheek, turning her face back to me and cutting her off. Wordlessly I pulled her towards me and folded my arms around her. "No, it's okay," I said, knowing that it wasn't and saying it anyway because it was what I thought needed to be said right now.

"_No it's not!_" she said suddenly, fiercely, pulling back. Her voice grew hoarse, and she dropped into English. "That motherfucker has murdered seventeen hundred people and _it's not okay!_ We are trapped in this goddamn shit world and it is _not okay!_ And I—" Her voice cracked, and as she looked up at me her tone and expression were that of someone confessing to a horrible sin. "I don't know what to do about it," she finished with a choked sob.

It was then that I realized what was consuming her at that moment, what was undermining her ability to cope: control. Camilla needed to be in control of her life. It was the reason for all the checklists, the reason for her sometimes standoffish humor, for her aggressive self-confidence, and for her drive to excel at everything she did. Kayaba had robbed her of that by trapping her in here, and in a way she was powerless to counter. For weeks she'd been burying that fact in combat, in the daily grind and the mission we'd been on as part of Diabel's party, because that was something she _could_ control.

With the news of how many had perished so far in this Death Game, some part of that defense had fallen away, and she'd been pummeled with the knowledge of just how very out of her control her fate in this world really was. And I wasn't helping by falling into my own pit of despair over it.

It was a problem I didn't know how to fix.

All I knew is that I had to _try_.

I laid my palms on her cheeks as she'd done to me on the day that we first found ourselves imprisoned here, and looked her straight in the eyes. "Rebecca," I said quietly, forcing calm into my voice. She held my gaze, something softening in her expression as I said her real name.

"What was it you said to me the first day, when I was losing my shit?"

She sniffled indelicately, reaching up and wiping her nose. A little bit of a smile tweaked the corner of her mouth, and it was the most beautiful thing I'd seen in days. "Lots of stuff," she answered.

"'_We can do this'_. That's what you said. You repeated it until you made me believe it. Do you still believe it?"

I had never in my life seen her looking smaller than she did then when she dropped her eyes. "No," she said in a child's whisper.

"Do." It was just one word, but it brought her eyes back up to mine. Something new was there; it might have been hope.

"We can do this," I repeated. "But I can't do it without you."

Hearing her own words given back to her brought another smile to her face, and this time I resolved to make it stay. "Besides," I said. "I'd make a _terrible_ tank."

Camilla opened her mouth to reply, closed it, and then gave a choked snort. That snort turned into laughter as she collapsed against me, laughing and laughing and laughing some more until we fell back to the floor together, banishing the weight of our predicament in laughter.

"Thank you, Seiji," she said when the mirth finally subsided. The weight of her head was reassuring on my chest, and I felt relief as I heard some of the familiar strength and confidence returning to her voice. "I'm sorry I fell apart on you."

"You're entitled to do that every now and then, you know. It's in the contract."

"That sucks. Remind me to revise the contract the next time it comes up."

"Say," I remarked from beneath her, changing the subject, "this floor is _really_ uncomfortable."

"Hm." She brushed her nose against mine, added a quick kiss, and then sat up. "Then let's find a bed. I'm pretty sure there's one in here somewhere."


	16. Downtime

Around midmorning the next day, Diabel gathered all of us at a table in the corner of the inn's common room for a party conference. Whereas we'd been moving out at first light while we were out adventuring, our leader seemed to understand that everyone was at the breaking point and needed time to recuperate. No one was rousted from bed before they chose to rise, and only after all of us had a full night's sleep and a solid breakfast under our belts did he call us over to join him and discuss our next move.

Real sleep and hot food had worked a stunning transformation on everyone. We weren't at a hundred percent, but everyone was smiling and retelling stories of some of the brighter moments in our adventure, victories that reminded us of how far we'd come and why we'd done it. Torik and Niara were sitting beside one another with their hands joined, and practically sparkled with the fresh energy of a young couple who'd just found each other. Niara blushed furiously when Camilla caught her eye over the table and winked. "Mission accomplished," my wife whispered in my ear.

When conversations started to thin out and everyone had finished their food, Diabel cleared his throat. The table fell silent.

"Good morning, everyone," he began. "Or rather, I guess now I should say good _day_." It was going on noon at this point. Everyone laughed; it was a sound we hadn't heard enough of from each other for some time.

"I'm glad you're all looking so much better. I'm sorry it took us so long to find a town, and that the journey was so miserable towards the end. I know some of you could've escaped at any time you wanted if you chose. I'm grateful beyond words that you stuck with us."

I didn't look towards Camilla when he indirectly mentioned our teleport crystals, but I caught her looking at me out of the corner of my eye.

Diabel continued, his tone markedly less cheerful as the subject matter changed. "Now we have a decision to make. I'm sure all of you by now have caught up on the current status of the game. Over one sixth of the original player base is dead. No one has yet reached even the town outside of the dungeon, let alone the dungeon entrance itself. I admit, this is discouraging news. I think we can all now imagine the reasons for the mood in this town when we arrived." All of us nodded gravely. No one interrupted.

"I believe it is now more important than ever for us to push onward as hard as we can and reach the dungeon that leads to the next floor. Once there we will exhaustively explore the dungeon until we locate the boss room, then return to town with the map data and form a plan for defeating it." Diabel looked each of us in the eye as he spoke, measuring our reactions.

"I suggest we all take today to recuperate, vendor our drops, repair our equipment, and top off on any supplies that are low. Eat well, laugh well, and sleep as much as you can with what time remains." Once again surveying each of us in turn, our leader sat up straighter in his chair and concluded his speech with resolve in his voice. "I will be moving onward tomorrow morning at first light. Our next stop is Tolbana, the largest town in this region and the nearest one to the dungeon. I've purchased map data that will lead us most of the way there, and it will become our base of operations for exploring the dungeon. Are all of you still with me?"

Camilla and I had already discussed our options earlier in the morning. We'd given serious thought to parting ways here with Diabel and making our way back to Horunka for a time. Despite the night's rest we were still quite weary in mind and body—which was a curious thought, given that the mind _was_ the body in here. We weren't sure if we had it in us for another trek like the one that had brought us here, let alone the potentially unspeakable danger of the floor's boss dungeon.

But in the end we'd agreed that we would most likely continue on with Diabel, and that we'd decide for sure once we heard his plan. When it all came down to it, we believed in his mission… and we believed in him. Now my wife and I looked at each other, and as we did we exchanged a pair of slight nods with barely a moment's consideration.

"We're in," Camilla said firmly. Diabel gave us a warm smile and a slight nod, appearing to have expected no less.

Agil bowed in place at the table. "Diabel, your leadership has been extraordinary, and I'm proud to have been a part of coming here with you. But I'm afraid I must return to the Starting City for a time."

Diabel returned the bow and deepened it. "The honor of fighting at your side has been mine, Agil. Do what you must and don't hesitate to message me if you'd like to join us again."

That left Torik and Niara. Torik wore a conflicted expression, looking between Niara and Diabel as if he had to make a choice and didn't much like his options.

"I can't do this," Niara said finally, after visibly working herself up to speak. "I-I'm sorry, Diabel. You've been so kind to me since the first day I logged into this game, and I can't ever repay you for that. I wouldn't be alive now if not for your guidance and trust. But I…"

"You have nothing to apologize for," Diabel said into the space left when she trailed off, no judgment in his face or tone. "That you accompanied me this far has been an honor, and it's been a joy to see you grow strong. And don't ever doubt that you are stronger than you think you are. Whatever choice you make, don't regret it."

If anything, this response made Torik's look of inner conflict worse. Holding Niara's hand in his, he looked up at Diabel and struggled for words. "Diabel, I… please understand, I want so badly to go with you. I share your feelings of obligation and duty. I just…"

"You now have something you don't want to lose," Diabel quietly finished for him.

Nodding, Torik met his leader's eyes. "That's exactly it."

Diabel closed his eyes and sighed. "I won't lie to you," he said. "With only three it'll be difficult to press on immediately. We're going to have to recruit new members to have a chance of making it as far as Tolbana."

"Torik," Niara said softly, drawing his gaze. She looked up at him in silence for a few moments, something unknowable flickering to life behind her eyes. "If this is what you want to do—what you _need_ to do—I won't hold you back."

"But Niara, I… I mean we… I don't want to leav—"

"You misunderstand," she said even more quietly, swallowing. "I'll go with you."

There was silence at the table. Torik's mouth hung open. When he finally found his voice, he stammered. "I—I… are you sure? I mean, y-you told me how scared you were…"

"I am," she answered, her voice filled with conviction and mustered courage. "I was. But I want to go where you are. If this is where you need to be, I'll be at your side until it's done."

Eyes threatening to tear up, Torik turned back to Diabel and bowed in his seat. "Leader, Niara and I are with you as far as you go."

Diabel's smile was absolutely radiant. "I can't tell you how pleased I am to have so many friends with me on the road ahead. We can do this with five, and if we find a sixth along the way—or if Agil," he added with a pleasant nod towards the large axeman, "decides to join us again, so much the better."

With all of that settled, we all said our goodbyes to Agil: Diabel and I with a strong hand clasp and Camilla with an unexpected hug that made Agil flush noticeably despite the hue of his skin. Torik and Niara went off to run errands in the town, and Diabel left Camilla and me to our own tasks.

Most of those tasks were dreadfully mundane. It took hours for us to finish getting all of our equipment repaired at the smithy, in part because of the line of players that had formed outside the shop. Our inventories were filled nearly to the brim with drops ranging from the nearly worthless stacks of wolf meat all the way up to a magnificent burnished bronze round shield that boosted Camilla's STR and AGI both by several points and was a significant upgrade to her defense as well. The shield she kept, along with a second backup sword; the rest got vendored off as fast as we could drag them to the item shop NPC's sell window. We replenished our supplies, including recovery items, and ended up with money left over.

"You know," I remarked as I showed Camilla how much we'd made from selling off all our loot, "setting aside the sheer living hell these last two weeks have been, this has been a pretty good run for us. We haven't quite made back all the money of Argo's that we blew on supplies, but we still have both teleport crystals and a fair number of the other recovery items—so that's not really money lost, just invested. We've both gotten a few gear upgrades along the way, and we're almost to the halfway point from level 9 to 10."

"Hm," Camilla said thoughtfully. "At this rate we may succeed in that challenge we set for ourselves. A few weeks late, mind, but…"

I thought back to that naïve moment when we'd thought we could make level 10 by the end of the first day. It was enough to draw a short bark of laughter out of me. "So we were off on the leveling curve by…"

"By an order of magnitude," Camilla put in with a smirk and a wink. "So do you think that we'll hit 10 by the time we reach the—hello, Earth to Kadyn." She waved a hand in front of my face and snapped her fingers.

As she spoke, I'd found my attention captured by a scene near the front of the inn. Diabel stood with his back to us, talking with someone who I had to assume was smaller than him, given that my view of his conversation partner was blocked by his body; at first I'd assumed that it was one of the other party members. At that point I saw Diabel reach out to clap the person on the shoulder in a friendly gesture before turning and entering the inn.

And that was when I saw Kibaou standing there.

* * *

"Tell me you're joking, Kadyn."

As we spoke, Camilla and I were sitting in our inn room with the door locked. Well, _I_ was sitting—my wife was pacing back and forth across the room as if she was trying to dig a rut in the floor. I took a sip of my tea to buy myself a few moments for my thoughts, and went on.

"I wish I could, but I know who and what I saw. Diabel was having a conversation with Kibaou, and it looked pretty friendly. The guy disappeared into the crowd moments after Diabel went inside, or I would've pointed him out to you. But it was him. No mistake."

"You're sure?"

I gave my wife a look. "No, I just said 'no mistake' and 'I know who and what I saw' because I wanted to get a rise out of—"

"All right, all right, I'm sorry. It's just—I have a hard time believing that Diabel would screw us. We've fought at his side for weeks. We've spent more time with him than any player other than maybe Agil." Camilla looked genuinely dismayed, and not just at the prospect of trouble. I knew she respected Diabel as much as I did, and if he of all people betrayed us, it'd be hard to ever trust anyone in this game again.

"I don't suppose you caught any of their conversation?"

I shook my head. "Afraid not."

"Did they look like they were messing with their menus? Like if they were trading or something?"

"Diabel's back was turned, and I didn't see Kibaou on the other side until after our leader had left."

Camilla paced wordlessly, her thoughts a mystery even to me.

"So do we confront him?" I asked.

She stopped and looked at me. "Who, Diabel? No, no, not over this. There's about a thousand perfectly legitimate reasons the two of them could've met here. For all we know they bumped into each other in the doorway and stopped to apologize."

I tried to imagine Kibaou humbly apologizing to Diabel for bowling him over. The image was so amusing that I had to stop laughing long enough to explain to Camilla why I was cracking up.

At last, Camilla stopped pacing a groove into the floor and came to sit down beside me in front of the wood stove. "Okay, well, I don't really see that we have any choice but to continue trusting Diabel. There's just not enough evidence to suggest that he's done anything wrong, and in my opinion he's more than earned the benefit of the doubt from us."

I couldn't argue with a word of that, and didn't. We decided to head downstairs and have dinner. Perhaps, if the opportunity arose, I'd take Diabel aside and find a diplomatic way of asking about Kibaou.

But as we descended the spiral staircase to the common area, an uncomfortable thought forced me to reconsider that plan. Other than Argo and Agil—and the boy himself, of course—Kibaou was the only person who knew the truth about what had happened with Reznor. Argo and Agil weren't telling (at least, I _hoped_ Argo wasn't; who knew what she'd really sell) but Kibaou had no great love for either of us, least of all Camilla. If given an opportunity to make us look bad, he'd take it, and we could end up ejected from the party and stranded here. We'd be forced to use our expensive and precious teleport crystals if we wanted to go back to Horunka.

When we arrived downstairs, the inn was bustling with far more players than it had been even earlier in the day. It wasn't the Mardis Gras atmosphere that had filled Horunka when the first wave of players arrived there, but it was obvious that we weren't the only group blazing trails to this side of the first floor, and with an influx of new people the overall mood wasn't as grim as it had been the previous night. It took a moment to find our group, Diabel's very distinctive blue hair the beacon that led us to our table.

As we sat down, I realized that we weren't the only group there. Two tables had been pushed together and a total of nine of us were now seated at what had become one big table. The sounds of laughter and boisterous conversation were music to my ears.

"Ah, glad you two could join us," Diabel said as we seated ourselves. "You're probably wondering why the big crowd. I'd like you to meet Kezwik, the leader of his party. Kezwik, this is Camilla—our group's main tank—and her husband Kadyn."

Kezwik was one of the oldest players I'd seen so far in SAO. If I'd had to guess I would've pegged him in his late 30s, maybe older—it was hard to tell because of the enormous bushy beard that covered his face and made him look almost like a stereotypical fantasy dwarf, albeit one about my height. His weapon wasn't on display, but I would not have been at all surprised to find him wielding a massive axe or war hammer. He gave us a jovial smile and tipped back a mug of steaming sake. "A pleasure! Diabel and I partied up once back in Horunka, and when we ran into each other here in town we hit on the idea of joining forces."

Diabel nodded, slapping Kezwik on the back amiably; the two sat next to each other. "The nine of us are too big for a single group, but if we join together as a small raid force we might be able to reach Tolbana in as little as a few days. Kez, you've already met the rest of my party now—why don't you introduce Camilla and Kadyn to the rest of yours?"

"Glad to!" Kezwik gestured first to the brown-haired man on the other side of him. "Ritsuo here uses a scimitar to good effect, and can repair equipment too." Ritsuo was slender, almost waifish—but I was willing to bet that his Agility stat was impressive, and having a smith along would be insanely useful. He gave us a nervous smile.

"Kindalosh here is our main tank, and a solid damage dealer." The man he named was large—not quite Agil's size but not far from it either. He wore his dark hair cropped so short that he was almost bald. I knew that it had to be his real-life appearance, and wondered if he was some kind of boxer or soldier in real life. He nodded crisply, his eyes sizing us up. I decided that _soldier_ was the more likely option, and that I'd be glad to have a professional warrior along.

At last Kezwik gestured to a form we couldn't see well due to Kindalosh's great mass. "And the quiet little thing behind him is, if you can believe it, our switch-in tank. He might not look like much, but trust me—he's quick and brave, and we're glad to have him. Come on, Reznor, take off the hood and say hi."

Both Camilla and I looked at each other in alarm. Ice water flooded my veins. When I turned to look at the player Kezwik had named, he'd pushed back his hood to reveal an unruly and very familiar mop of blond hair. Brown eyes stared widely back at us from behind his bangs, and those eyes were filled with the absolute terror of a cornered animal.


	17. Tolbana

I'm not sure how long we sat there staring at each other. It couldn't have been too long, or else someone else surely would've spoken up into the awkward silence. But at first Camilla and I were too shocked at this unexpected development to speak, and Reznor looked too petrified to even move, his eyes pleading with us.

My wife was the first to break the spell. "We're pleased to meet all of you," she said at last, looking directly at Reznor as she began and then shifting her gaze to the others to cover it. "Please forgive us for being a little out of it. It's been a _very_ long road."

Following her lead, I added my own voice, trying to keep an edge out of it. "Yes, please. It'll be good to be surrounded by more people we can trust to have our backs." I felt Camilla's foot come down on mine under the table, and managed not to react. Perhaps that had been a poor choice of words on my part.

Although relief had flooded his face when we didn't immediately call him out, Reznor still looked scared. He returned to his food and shrank back in his chair. Some of the others from both parties were giving him odd looks, but Diabel's eyes were on us, his gaze thoughtful.

Silence fell again, and we were grateful for the interruption of the NPC waitress, who'd been standing behind us and holding back until no one had spoken for a time. Camilla and I both ordered our meals, and when we returned our attention to the table the tension had dissipated somewhat. Diabel had his map window open and was showing it to Kezwik as they planned the route we were going to take. Niara and Torik had their heads together, and Rituso and Kindalosh were pecking at the air with their fingers in a pattern that suggested they were going through their inventories. Reznor ate in silence, his hood drawn back over his head and his eyes down.

Neither of us spoke again until we'd finished our meals, at which point we made excuses about being exhausted and retired to our room. As soon as the door had locked behind us, Camilla leaned back against it and blew out a sharp breath. "Talk about awkward," she said.

"Awkward isn't the word for it. 'Sudden rush of shit to the heart' is more like it."

Usually my wisecracks, however lame, would at least provoke something of a smile from Camilla. Not now. When she didn't answer, I asked, "So do we continue on?"

Camilla crossed the room and flopped face-down on the bed, not even removing her equipment. "What do you think?" she asked. Despite her voice being muffled by the pillow, I could tell she was asking the question in all sincerity rather than as a rhetorical sarcasm.

I had to really think about it. Reznor had betrayed us, even tried to kill me. But Camilla had come within a hair's breadth of killing him in return… and in the end, had healed him and let him go, giving him a second chance. He was just a thirteen-year-old kid. We'd decided to believe that he wasn't a lost cause, and hidden the fact that he'd tried to PK us in order to give him a chance to make something different of himself.

His current party members didn't seem to have any idea of what he'd done before, and he seemed well-regarded as a member of that party. So far as I could tell, he'd taken the chance we'd given him and run with it.

But that didn't mean he wouldn't come looking for revenge—if not against me, then against Camilla for scaring the life out of him and nearly taking that life. He was just a kid, and the same changeable quality of childhood that made him worth giving a chance also meant that he was unpredictable.

"His party seems to trust him," I said carefully after deliberating at length. "I'm not turning my back on him, but I'm not going to out him either. If we'd wanted to do that, we would've done it when Argo came calling on us."

Rolling onto her side, Camilla opened her equipment menu and began removing armor piece by piece. "But that's not really the question, is it? The question is whether or not we continue on as part of Diabel's group, knowing that it means we're going to be traveling with Reznor."

As I activated the wood stove in the room and began shedding my own armor, I considered my wife's argument and spoke slowly, talking through my thoughts. "That scene down at dinner was really tense, and I think pretty much everyone there could guess that we had some kind of history with Reznor from the way the three of us reacted, regardless of what excuses we made."

She looked up at me as she situated herself under the blanket, shivering a little. "That's not likely to be the last such scene if we spend days or weeks traveling with him."

"Perhaps," I said uncertainly. "I don't know."

Patting the bed beside her, Camilla lifted the covers in invitation. "Well then, maybe this will help you sort it out. We're here, in Yakuld. There's no warp gate here to take us back to another town. I doubt we could hunt this area by ourselves. Our choices pretty much boil down to either using our only teleport crystals, which there's no guarantee we'll be able to replace—or moving on with a party. We have a party, and it's filled with people we know we can trust with our lives. There will be other companions now, and we don't know if we can trust them, but we don't know that we can't."

"You're saying we should stick with Diabel and trust the people in our party to watch our backs regardless of what we think of the people in the other party," I said as I killed the lights and slipped beneath the covers, seeking Camilla's reassuring warmth.

"I'm saying," she clarified, "that doing so is probably our best option right now, and isn't necessarily even a bad one."

We decided to sleep on it.

Diabel had said to be ready to depart at first light, so Camilla and I had set our alarms for 5:00 AM. The time of our departure made us grateful for getting to sleep so early in the evening, and despite the lack of coffee at the inn Camilla managed to become human enough for social interaction after three cups of the strong black tea the innkeeper offered.

Neither of us had really discussed it after waking up, but when we joined the group in the common room neither of us took Diabel aside or declared any intention to leave the group, so by default we found ourselves moving on with the rest. There was still a degree of awkwardness wherever Reznor was involved, but he no longer wore the look of abject terror that he'd had at first during dinner, and the fact that everyone had tasks to perform and preparations to make helped us all bury our unease in work.

Whatever our misgivings, Reznor proved his worth once we set out from the town's Safe Zone and started pulling mobs. As a tank he was nowhere near Camilla's level of effectiveness, nor even Diabel's—but while he was in combat he didn't shrink from what he had to do, and fought well. His only real weakness in that role was his use of blunt weapons, which didn't lend themselves well to parrying. We didn't speak to each other, but we didn't clash either. I supposed that was all we could really ask for.

Diabel's idea about forming a small raid group for the journey also proved to be well-founded. With nine of us we were able to make embarrassingly short work of even single mobs around our level, albeit with dramatically reduced EXP gain—and encounters that would've been hairy even when we had Agil with us became a breeze. Although the path leading from Yakuld to Tolbana was snaky and inconsistent, the battles along the way barely forced us to break stride, and we made excellent time.

Within a few days the forest started thinning out, sparse clumps of trees dotting a pastoral landscape that put me in mind of photos I'd seen of rural France or Holland. The resemblance became even greater as we saw the first hints of a town on the horizon, its borders visibly defined by an irregular series of large white windmills that turned slowly in the gusty breezes blowing across the lush grassland.

"If I'm not mistaken," Diabel said as he called the party to a halt on the crest of a large hill. "That there in the distance is Tolbana." He stopped and made a point of checking his map, nodding in satisfaction.

"Wow, look at the tower," Torik said, pointing at the sky beyond the town. It was hard to miss at this distance—what had been a squat cylinder of dark gray stone from so many kilometers away now practically dominated the skyline as it rose a hundred meters from the valleys at the northern edge of the first floor. We had to be less than a kilometer from Tolbana now, with the tower dungeon not far beyond it—and the former was completely dwarfed by the latter. It was an awe-inspiring sight.

And we were going to have to _clear_ that.

I checked my system menu; it was our fourth day of travel since leaving Yakuld, and not even lunchtime yet. _We might actually get to have lunch in town—perhaps even take a peek in the dungeon before nightfall!_ My thoughts were racing as the realization dawned of how close we were to our objective, and when I glanced over at Camilla she had a silly grin on her face.

"Come on, everyone!" Diabel called out, his own face alight. "If we double-time it we can get ourselves set up in the inn at Tolbana and still have time in the day for some productive exploration!" It was as if he'd voiced my own thoughts, and I rushed onward down the unpaved dirt road with as much enthusiasm as anyone else in the party.

Tolbana turned out to be just as beautiful up close as it was from afar. Despite the boundaries being only a few hundred meters from edge to edge, it had the look of a bustling small town filled with NPC activity of every imaginable kind. The architecture had a quaint northern European look, built around a crumbling ancient amphitheater in the center of town that looked to be made of the same pale orange stone as the ruined temple we'd come across in the forest. Farmhouses sprawled out loosely from the town limits outside of the Safe Zone, and I could see NPCs working the fields and herding livestock in the distance.

It looked like a nice place to live. I supposed I could think of worse places out of which to base our expeditions.

When we arrived at the inn, we found that we weren't the first players to reach Tolbana. A small handful of them were spread out individually within the dining area, each in various stages of having their lunch. One of them, a player of indeterminate gender and medium build, was a complete unknown: they sat concealed beneath a hooded cloak in the shadows filling one of the back corners, the glare of the sunlight coming in through the windows making it difficult to see their features. Another, a slender man with light armor and a short sword who had the look of an Agility-based character, nodded at us in a friendly but noncommittal way, acknowledging us but showing no sign of wanting to strike up conversation.

The third was familiar to me. Dark eyes looked out from behind darker hair, and a gray coat just barely brushed the floor beneath his seat. The black handle of a longsword stuck out from behind one shoulder, and he sipped quietly at a cup of tea, isolated from the others as much by expression and body language as by physical distance. When our parties entered through the front door, several conversations still ongoing amongst our members, he finished his tea quickly and rose to his feet as if to leave.

Kezwik's party didn't seem to recognize him from anywhere, but the conversation between Niara and Torik immediately ceased, replaced by an uncomfortable stillness. Diabel said nothing to the lone swordsman, and walked past him expressionlessly in order to address the NPC innkeeper. We all dispersed and lined up to wait our turn.

All of us except for my wife. As the young solo player headed towards the front door, she cleared her throat slightly. "Kirito… wasn't it?"

I paused halfway between Camilla and the line forming for the innkeeper, and turned back in time to see the youth stop and look at her cautiously. "Yes."

Camilla bowed slightly, and asked, "I understand if you're reluctant to share this information, but would you tell me where that sword dropped? It's beautiful and I'd love to get one."

Kirito regarded Camilla with a sidewise look, and then turned to face her squarely, not quite meeting her eyes. "It's not a drop," he said, his tone wary and a little curt. "It's the reward from a quest at the item shop in Horunka."

"_Honma?_" Camilla exclaimed, a little too loudly. The word and the accent with which she spoke seemed to draw a small, extremely brief smile from Kirito as she slapped her forehead. "And we were right there the whole time…"

"It's a dangerous quest," he advised after a pause, each word sounding like it had to be pulled out with effort. "I don't recommend it unless you've spent some time leveling up and have a party you can trust."

Camilla looked in my direction. I simply nodded to her, the smile on my face a plain expression of support. "I have, and I do," she replied with another bow. "So thank you."

Kirito glanced over at me, and then back to my wife. The relationship between us seemed to click suddenly in his head; he nodded. "I see. Well, good luck. Excuse me."

As the inn door closed behind him, Camilla practically bounced her way over to me, grabbing my arm and maneuvering me towards the innkeeper. "I'm gonna get a new swoooord," she sang happily at me in English, grinning like a fool.

Diabel was still standing at the counter, an unreadable expression on his face. While I rented a room for Camilla and me, he remarked offhandedly to her, "What was that all about?"

I found the question and tone a little odd, but nothing could penetrate Camilla's euphoria at learning that the sword she coveted was a predictable quest reward rather than a random drop. "Oh, I just asked him where he got his sword."

"And he told you?" Diabel asked, still in that oddly even tone—as if his indifference was put on.

"Well sure," she said. "He doesn't seem that bad. He's just got solo player social disease."

Nodding as if that made some kind of sense to him, Diabel shifted his weight from foot to foot. The nervous motion was very unlike him, and it cemented my suspicion that he was hiding _something_. I wondered idly if he and Kirito had some kind of past, and decided after thinking it over that it was probably none of my business. Certainly it hadn't affected the safety of the group even when we'd run into him out in the forest.

By the time I emerged from these thoughts Diabel had already left the conversation—and the inn. Camilla tried poking me in my ticklish spot, and frowned as my lack of reaction reminded her that that didn't work in SAO. "Sorry," I said, shaking my head to clear the mental tangent. "Forest Elves."

"Figured. Come on, let's go get a bite to eat, then get our gear taken care of and run a few errands. Diabel wants us all to meet in front of the inn within the hour."

That hour passed more quickly than expected. Camilla and I were getting good at the routine of vendoring loot and repairing our equipment as we learned where all the buttons were on the pop-up windows for each task—which seemed to be universal from NPC to NPC, as would be expected of good game design. And I had to hand it to Kayaba, however grudgingly: SAO could've been used to teach a college-level course on good UI and game design.

If, you know, it hadn't been a death trap.

There was no motivational speech from Diabel this time, simply a nod to each of us as we all arrived on time, fully equipped and ready to move out. "All right, let's get going," he said as he pointed towards the tower that loomed over the town like a malignant sentinel of dark gray stone. "The dungeon isn't far from the town, and I have mapping data for the first level. We'll push as hard as we can for the next four or five hours, and then return to the inn for the evening and get an early start again tomorrow." He scrubbed both hands together and smiled. "Lather, rinse, repeat. Any questions?"

There were none. "Then let's move!" Diabel said as he led the way towards the unknown perils of the first floor dungeon.


	18. The Trap

Despite the moments of tension surrounding Reznor's appearance and my vague suspicions about Diabel, the short journey to the dungeon saw a resurgence of the uplifting atmosphere that we had carried with us through the early parts of our weeks-long quest. Once again it felt almost like we were on a field trip in the company of good friends, and although Camilla and I didn't interact much with Kezwik's party, the two groups were becoming more and more effective as a fighting unit as time went on.

Kindalosh was particularly impressive in battle; from the way he moved and fought with his katana, I was almost certain that my guess about a military background was right on the nose. It made me feel very good about our chances. Kezwik himself was no slouch, laying waste to mobs with well-placed scything blows from his battle axe and yelling with a berserk quality that probably didn't have any effect on mob psychology but managed to stir everyone's blood when we needed it most.

Ritsuo, confirming my suspicions about his build, practically made his scimitar dance. From the way he moved I caught myself wondering if he'd been a beta tester—until I realized that at this point, after three weeks spent in the game 24 hours a day, all of us easily had as much or more practice moving and fighting in this world as any of the beta testers had had—and under life or death conditions at that. Camilla certainly seemed to have taken to it like a fish to water, and despite her character being almost entirely STR-based, she moved with a beautiful, efficient grace that sometimes made me stop and just watch her, marveling at how lucky I was.

After perhaps 40 minutes of travel through a well-lit series of lightly forested fields—longer than we'd expected, but still leaving plenty of daylight—we at last arrived at the entrance to the tower. Down here at ground level, a broken archway of pale orange stone blocks framing a dark hallway thrust out of the rocky wall of the valley through which we had traveled, the tower itself rising far above like an obelisk of matte gray. The tower dungeon was so wide that as it stretched off in either direction it only disappeared when it curved out of sight, like a pair of horizon lines turned on their sides.

Camilla and I joined hands as we gazed up at the massive structure, neither of us needing words to know what the other was feeling at that moment: a sense of awe, of humility in the face of an architectural feat that would be one of the wonders of the world if it had been real—and if the megastructure of Aincrad itself didn't dwarf it by many orders of magnitude.

And then the moment passed, and Diabel rallied us all to venture inside.

Although "dungeon" is a term of art in fantasy roleplaying games, referring to just about any kind of self-contained sequence of interior areas containing enemies to fight, sometimes the term is literally appropriate as well. The dungeon of the Ruin Kobolds was not one of those dungeons—it was more accurate to describe it as a _maze_. Once we arrived, Diabel shared the map of the first level that he'd purchased with both parties, and as soon as I examined it I rolled my eyes and groaned.

"Is something wrong, Kadyn?" Diabel held up his hand to halt the party as we headed down the entrance hallway.

I shook my head quickly, making a dismissive gesture. "No, you don't have to stop; it's fine. I just…"

"Kadyn hates mazes on principle," Camilla said with a hint of amusement in her voice as we resumed our march.

"They're _lazy_," I explained emphatically, venting a longstanding peeve of mine. "When you see a maze in a game, it almost always represents a complete lack of imagination or effort on the part of the person designing it. You can design a _computer program_ to generate random mazes for you." I'd done so myself. "Designing a real dungeon with an interesting layout that makes sense and looks like it had an in-character purpose for being there originally takes actual creative effort."

There were a few moments of silence following my rant. Then almost everyone started laughing, which lasted until Diabel shushed us to avoid drawing aggro, although he was having trouble keeping a straight face himself.

"What?" I asked, not seeing the humor.

"Say what you want about Kayaba Akihito—" Diabel began.

"Oh believe me, I've got _plenty_ to say about that fucker," Camilla interjected, drawing another round of laughter that was more subdued in volume.

Diabel continued as if he hadn't been interrupted. "I don't think a lack of imagination was one of his faults."

I gave that point a rueful grin. "Well, it looks like he phoned in this dungeon. Or outsourced it. Lucky us."

"Hey," Camilla said, bumping me with her hip. "Look on the bright side. Maybe he phoned in the boss, too."

* * *

With a total of nine players, we made good time through the first floor—especially since we already had the map to it. Diabel was navigating for us, but as we progressed further through the dimly lit stone hallways I periodically pulled up my own map to get my bearings and get a feel for where I my Searching skill was likely to come in handy for preventing an ambush.

By this point I had leveled up Searching enough through the weeks of near-constant use that we were rarely ever surprised by a mob. I was still only a fraction of the way towards mastering it—that would take a thousand points, and I didn't even have the skill anywhere close to 100 yet—but it was good enough against the mobs we were facing. In this area only certain named seemed to have a level or a Hiding skill high enough to remain concealed from me, and it meant we suffered very little damage and no surprises in clearing the first level. By the time we reached the winding staircase leading to the unknown territory of the second level, we were feeling pretty good.

Diabel took a torch from the wall and shined it up into the stairwell, then looked at me. I shook my head; I'd already scanned the area.

"Okay everyone," our leader said, turning to address us as he opened his system menu. "It's currently… just after 4. We've made outstanding time, and we've reached the end of the mapped area thus far. It'll take us maybe an hour or so to get back to town from where we are. Do we want to have a quick bite to eat and press on, or should we call it a day?"

We discussed it at some length. Camilla and I were leaning towards pressing on, as were Kindalosh, Reznor and Kezwik. Ritsuo was on the fence but willing to stick with whatever his party decided, and Torik and Niara expressed a preference for getting a real meal (and, Camilla suggested to me in a furtive whisper, probably some alone time together).

After measuring all of these responses, Diabel nodded to us. "Okay then. The general consensus is that most of us would like to see how far we can get today. Niara, Torik, will the two of you be all right with pushing forward? We can give it another hour and then call it; by that point we'll be getting back to town between six and seven. There'll be plenty of time for a late meal and a good night's sleep."

The two exchanged looks. "What do you think, Niara?" Torik asked. I wondered if he really wanted to keep going, but had suggested returning because that's what she wanted.

Niara put on a forced smile. "Let's go. He's right; there'll be plenty of time when we get back." I decided then that my wife had probably been right about their motivations—and that there could be worse motivations for calling it an early day.

Diabel clapped his hands once and grinned. "That's the spirit! Let's go, then."

In single file, we proceeded up the dark spiral staircase to the second level. There we found a wide entry foyer of the same dark stone as the rest of the maze so far, but after a brief scan confirmed there were no mobs, we wasted no time in continuing onward.

After a good 10 minutes of progressing through the maze with almost no encounters, I started to wonder if there was something special about this level. Sometimes in dungeons the challenges would have a "theme" that varied from area to area—one floor might be filled with trash mobs, while another would be light on enemies but heavy on puzzle elements, the thin monster population intended to allow players to focus on solving the puzzles.

That train of thought seemed to have merit when we arrived at a massive room lined with stone columns, a thick metal portcullis barring the way forward. Two short side passages lit with torches led to a pair of levers. It was one of the simplest kinds of multiplayer puzzle: in order to open the barred exit, both levers would have to be pulled at the same time.

Diabel seemed to realize this as well. He gave a knowing smile and explained the straightforward premise of the puzzle to both parties, asking for a volunteer to pull the second lever; he'd pull the first himself. It was one of the things I respected the most about Diabel as a leader—he never shied away from any danger he might ask someone else to face. Although my Searching skill revealed nothing, there was every possibility that the levers were trapped in some way.

Torik raised his hand immediately, and Diabel gave him a friendly clap on the shoulder. "Why did I know you'd be the first one to step up, Torik? Come on, let's get this done and move on."

After I took a moment to look over both levers carefully to ensure that there were no visible traps that my Searching skill didn't catch, both men took their positions in front of the lever while the rest of us gathered in the middle of the main chamber and waited. "Count of three," Diabel called.

On three, Diabel and Torik each yanked their levers down with a ratcheting sound and a loud _clack_ at the end. I heard chains and gears moving behind the walls, and the portcullis that had barred our way rose into the ceiling with a sound of grinding metal and stone—right as one slammed shut to block the door through which we'd come. A few moments later, we heard what sounded like another lever being pulled into place, and two more barred gates trapped Diabel and Torik within the side passages.

"What the—" Camilla had her weapon out immediately, and the others weren't far behind.

"Trap!" I said loudly, scanning for mobs in case this was set to spawn adds when the trap was tripped.

"Oh, you have _no_ idea," came a new voice that did not belong to any party member.

Something struck me, pierced the skin of my exposed neck. At once I lost control of my body, slumping back against a stone pillar as a long, thin metal nail fell to the ground with a tinny sound. When I glanced at my HP gauge, I saw that the projectile had done barely any damage… but a yellow icon with a lightning bolt flashed beside the gauge, indicating that I was afflicted with a _Paralysis_ status effect.

I could still lift my head, and when I did I saw that almost everyone in the room was down in a similar state. The three exceptions were Kezwik, Kindalosh and Camilla, all three of which seemed to have resisted the effect or had not been struck. They stood back to back in a triangle formation several meters away from me, facing outward and frantically turning their heads to try to identify the threat.

That threat made itself known soon enough. As I watched, a sinking feeling in my chest, five cloaked and hooded players with orange cursors emerged from the shadows behind the pillars, almost melting out of them as if they'd—

As if they'd been Hidden. With a level of skill that exceeded my Searching ability.

"My, my," said one of the assailants as they surrounded the three unaffected party members, clapping slowly and mockingly. "What a catch we have here."

"Indeed," said another. "The best yet."

"You bastards!" howled Kezwik, leaping at the nearest cloaked figure. The figure stepped into Kezwik's attack, his dagger flashing far more quickly than the ponderous swing of the battle axe, and stabbed twice faster than I could follow. Kezwik's HP dropped slightly, but I could tell from looking at his gauge as he crumpled to the floor that he was now paralyzed too.

Camilla gritted her teeth and tensed as if to spring. One of the orange players, a man with what looked like a half-mask of a skull under his hood, cackled and pressed the tip of his rapier into the back of Kezwik's neck just enough to bring forth the red pixellated glow of a wound. "Oh, _please_ do."

"Drop the weapon and shield," another said flatly.

"If you think there's any threat in the world that can make me give up my weapon now," Camilla growled dangerously, "think again. You and I both know that the moment I do, every one of us is dead. Try it and we'll see just how many of you assholes I can take with me."

There was a stir amongst the PKers. One of them threw back his head and cackled. "Oh, I _like_ her. She has spirit."

"She does," said the one who'd demanded her weapon, a smirk visible beneath his hood. "Too much. It seems there was substance to the story after all."

"What story?" Camilla demanded as she stood back to back with Kindalosh, her eyes slashing left and right as she watched for sudden moves.

"The one about you and your husband taking out a player killer, of course," the smirking PKer replied. "It's why we targeted you in the first place. That little tale has done quite a bit of damage to our reputation. We can't allow a player to kill one of us and escape unpunished. Your death at our hands will correct that problem." At that point I noticed that one of the PKers had a small eight-sided crystal held in his hand, a light flashing on it. I'd seen those crystals before; these PKers were _recording_ the whole thing.

Camilla snorted with utter contempt, her sword swaying to point from target to target as she watched her flanks. "Think again. Your reputation sucks because you're a bunch of impotent turd burglars who need a game to do what you never had the stones to do in real life."

I don't think I'd ever loved my wife more than I did at that moment. I just wished that I wasn't powerless to help her. I flexed my fingers, but couldn't even raise my wrists off the ground. There was nothing I could do but watch.

The smirk vanished from the PKer's face. "Enough talk. Drop the weapon or someone dies."

"Better idea," Camilla retorted. "You drop dead or walk away."

"Then it's showtime." The apparent leader flicked his eyes towards the skull-mask PKer. With a laugh, the other man shoved the point of his rapier deep into the back of Kezwik's neck, all the way through to the floor. Kezwik's shrieks continued to echo in the massive room long after his avatar finished shattering.

Camilla's hands tightened on her sword and shield, her stance shifting. "You bastards," she snarled. "How did you even know we were here?"

There was that hateful smirk again from their leader. "You people are so naïve. Don't you know how this works? You've got a little bird in your party who's been feeding us intel."

My eyes went to Reznor where he lay on the floor. I stared my hate into the back of his head as if I could kill him with will alone. Camilla seemed to have the same thought as her gaze snapped down to the boy briefly before returning to her targets. "You people make me fucking sick." I knew she had to be stalling for time, hoping that the paralysis would wear off on one of us if she kept the PKers talking.

The PKers knew it too. "Ask me if I care. Next," said the leader as if he was serving up death at the lunch counter.

"Can I have the next one?" begged one of the cloaked players who hadn't spoken yet, his voice high and shrill.

The leader nodded. Laughing happily, the shrill-voiced PKer knelt in one swift move and pricked Niara with his dagger, causing her to cry out. The _Poison_ status icon appeared beside her HP gauge as Torik screamed helpless defiance from the side passage where he was trapped.

"Time's wasting, Valkyrie," the PK leader said. "At the rate her HP is dropping, she has… oh, I'd say maybe a minute to live. Drop your sword and shield and I'll consider letting you give her an antidote potion before I kill you. Decide now."

"Please!" Torik begged, shouting to be heard. "Please, she has nothing to do with whatever you have against them! Just let her have the antidote and let us go!"

I could see tears forming in Camilla's eyes as she stared down the PK leader. I had no idea what was going through her head at that moment, but I could take any number of guesses. _Please don't_, I silently begged my wife. _They're going to kill all of us anyway. I'm sorry Niara, but please, Camilla, don't drop your—_"

"No," Camilla said flatly, her expression anguished but resolute. "I know how this game works. Let's just do this now." Torik screamed curses at her, both he and Niara sobbing and pleading.

Letting out an exasperated breath, the lead PKer made a gesture. "Fine. Take her down."

Camilla drew back her sword, preparing to execute a technique and engage in battle with the PKers. None of them rushed her, however. Instead, I could only shout a useless, belated warning as Kindalosh turned around and laid the blade of his katana against her neck from behind.


	19. Aftermath

"Now," the cloaked leader of the PKers said happily as Kindalosh revealed his treachery and got the drop on Camilla. He smirked again as he drew a wicked-looking serrated dagger. "Where were we?"

"On your knees, bitch," Kindalosh growled out in a voice like liquid gravel, the blade of his katana pressing against Camilla's neck hard enough to draw a pencil-thin line of glowing red pixels there.

"The last guy who said that to me," Camilla said tightly as her sword lowered very, very slowly, "found himself singing soprano for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir."

Kindalosh scowled at the sentence peppered with English words and pressed the sword; I saw a sliver of Camilla's HP gauge disappear as his cursor turned orange from having dealt actual damage to a green player. Under the pressure of the blade, she sank slowly to the ground, a look of helpless misery fighting with impotent rage for control of her features. She turned her head to look at me, and mouthed _I love you_ silently. I almost choked before I could do the same.

"Your weapon and shield," intoned the PK leader sharply. The longsword clattered to the stone floor, followed a moment later by the hollow gong-like sound of her shield doing the same. The leader kicked both aside and gathered up a generous fistful of Camilla's red hair as he kneed her between the shoulder blades, yanking her head back and forcing her to look up into his face with her throat bared.

"You," he said acidly, "have been a serious pain in the ass. It's time that players feared us again." And with that, he placed the serrated edge of the dagger against Camilla's neck.

At that moment, several things happened at once.

With the awful death knell of shattering glass, Niara died, her HP finally exhausted by the poison. Torik howled as if he'd been fatally gored. Everyone's gaze was drawn involuntarily to the sudden noises and the burst of light in their peripheral vision. Taking advantage of the distraction, Camilla drove her elbow back into the PK leader's crotch, sending him stumbling backwards a step as his dagger slipped away from her neck. Grunting from the impact but feeling no pain from SAO's combat system, he awkwardly stabbed the dagger down into her shoulder.

I cried out, fighting with every bit of will I possessed to overcome the paralysis—and failing. "Rebecca! No!"

"_Oneesan!_" That cry came from Reznor, whose paralysis effect had worn off while the PKers were distracted by Niara's death. As Camilla fell to the ground, the boy leapt at the PK leader and tackled him around the midsection, raining blows on him with his fists.

"Kill them all!" screamed the leader as he stabbed frantically again and again at the flailing mass on top of him.

But although wounded, Camilla had retrieved her sword and shield, and as two of the PKers launched themselves at her, she hammered the edge of the shield into the belly of one of them while letting the other impale himself on her sword. As the one staggered back, momentarily stunned by the blow, Camilla's twisted and removed her longsword, and executed a lightning-quick technique that traced a V-shape of shining light on the torso of the impaled player. As he exploded into a glimmering cloud of polygons, she spun on her heel and deflected Kindalosh's katana with a sweep of her shield, dealing a grazing counterslash to him while he leapt backwards.

Ritsuo recovered from his paralysis right as one of the PKers was about to stab him, and the short sword sunk into a crack in the floor instead of the lithe swordsman's body as he rolled aside. Coming to his feet as the PKer struggled to free his weapon, his scimitar flashed several times, severing his target's weapon hand and drawing glowing red ribbons on the enemy's avatar until it shimmered and exploded into green particles with an echoing scream.

As I saw the paralysis icon finally flash once and disappear from my HUD, a second death animation played off to my left. I turned just in time to see the PK leader stab Reznor one final time and leap to his feet amidst the expanding cloud of green that signaled the boy's end. I gave a yell and drew my dagger, rising with a speed I never knew I possessed and dashing towards the PKer as he moved in to backstab Camilla—who was already being double-teamed by Kindalosh and another surviving PKer, and suffering a death by a thousand cuts as she moved her shield and sword in an accelerating blur that nevertheless failed to deflect everything coming at her. Her HP was yellow and dropping steadily.

My Leaping Stab technique took the PK leader in the side—not a critical hit, but enough to disrupt his attack against my wife. He dealt me a spinning kick that did no damage but sent me reeling. Seeming to sense that the tide of the battle had turned, the cloaked figure put two fingers in his mouth and whistled sharply.

As he did, the two PKers who had been fighting with Camilla and Ritsuo withdrew, dashing with terrible speed down the hallway that led deeper into the dungeon maze alongside their leader. Kindalosh raged at their abandonment of him, screaming curses at their retreating backs. As he did, Camilla used the distraction to smite him full-on with her shield. His katana clattered on the stone as he went tumbling across the ground.

No more enemies stood against us. It was over.

Well, almost. Keeping my dagger ready in case there were any more surprises, I went to join Camilla at her side where I belonged. She held the tip of her sword against Kindalosh's throat as he knelt in front of her with a resigned scowl.

"Well?" he demanded. "Get on with it. I'm ready to die."

A war waged itself across my wife's face, a war with stakes at which I could only guess. Her eyes were red and puffy as she stared down at the traitor with a depth and breadth of hate beyond measure. I started to reach out and touch her arm, and decided the better of it—I didn't want to distract her and give Kindalosh an opening for a desperate attempt to reverse his circumstances.

"Camilla!" Diabel shouted. He, like Torik, was still trapped in one of the side passages by a metal gate; Ritsuo seemed to be searching for the lever that would free them. "There's a jail in the starting city! We can take him there and justice will be served!"

A very, very slight smile quirked at the corner of Kindalosh's mouth. "Of course, that works too," he said.

Camilla's chest hitched slightly—I couldn't tell if it was an aborted laugh, a hiccup, or a sob. The clouds on her face gathered into a storm, and with a sudden ugly grimace she forced the tip of the blade straight down through the gap between Kindalosh's throat and sternum, twisting it from side to side as she worked it in until the entire length of it was buried in his torso, her weight pressing on the pommel.

Kindalosh shrieked when he was pierced, and kept doing so with a guttural howl as the blade of the sword worked its way through him. His body twitched and seized as he looked up at her, eyes wide with the knowledge of approaching death, grabbing her arm with both massive hands and trying to push the blade back out.

But while his mass and strength must have been considerable in the real world, in SAO what counted was the STR stat—and Camilla's was higher by far than the balanced stats of a katana user. She stared back down at him, her face a mask of hate and emotional anguish, holding his gaze unwaveringly while his HP gauge slowly emptied—right up to the point where his eyes rolled back into his head. A moment later his avatar shimmered with light, went translucent and broke into a million evanescent polygons, leaving only Camilla's sword resting point-first on the stone floor as she leaned on it.

"_There's _your justice," she said hoarsely, spitting on the ground where Kindalosh had spent his last moments. She dropped the sword and shield at her side; they echoed loudly in the silence that followed.

And then she collapsed to her knees, buried her head in her hands, and started sobbing uncontrollably.

* * *

Nobody spoke as the survivors of the PK ambush returned to Tolbana. It was late, the sky just losing the myriad shades of blue and red-amber that appear only for a few minutes when the sun has already set but darkness has not yet settled.

Diabel, Torik, Ritsuo, Camilla and I—each of us likely had our own reasons for our silence.

I could sense that Diabel was deeply disturbed—not just because of the people we'd lost, some of whom were close to him, but because of what Camilla had done at the end. He kept looking at her with a haunted expression, looking away anytime he saw that I noticed.

Torik, of course, had lost Niara—a senseless, purposeless death for which I could tell he blamed Camilla. It would've been no use pointing out that if Camilla had disarmed herself earlier, we'd all be dead right now—that her stalling was all that allowed our paralysis effects to wear off in time, and that Niara's death shatter had actually served as a distraction at a critical moment, buying his life with hers.

Ritsuo I didn't know well enough to read, but his entire party was dead and one of them had been a traitor who betrayed us all. I could guess at his thoughts.

Camilla and walked silently next to each other, neither speaking nor touching. It had taken a long time for her to become functional or responsive again, and we hadn't had time to talk about it. I didn't try. Every time I reached out to touch her or take her hand, she flinched away.

When at last we returned to the inn at Tolbana, we all paused awkwardly just inside the door. Torik leveled one last hateful glare at Camilla and stalked up the stairway to his room. Ritsuo faded away, going to the innkeeper and ordering several cups of sake, presumably to drown his troubles. I knew that wouldn't work here in SAO: I'd tried once.

That left Diabel with the two of us. Camilla stared more or less straight ahead, not really looking at anyone or anything even if they were right in her line of sight. Her thousand-yard stare was that of someone who'd been completely hollowed out, leaving nothing but a husk.

I looked over at her, saw the state she was in, and looked back at Diabel. He returned my gaze, his mouth occasionally working as if he wanted to say something, but aborted it each time before it was more than a muscle spasm.

I wasn't sure I trusted myself to speak. I could feel my friendship with Diabel—was it a friendship?—slipping away. "Tomorrow," I said. I could've meant just about anything by it. I wasn't quite sure what I _did_ mean.

Glancing over at Camilla once more, Diabel looked back at me and nodded. "Tomorrow, then," he said. It, too, could've stood in for any number of ideas for what tomorrow held.

I ordered a hot tea and gently led Camilla up to our room by the arm; she followed numbly, as if she'd lost her own volition and was simply going wherever I did. When the door close and locked, sealing away the world outside, I set the tea on the bedside table and nudged my wife towards a sitting position on the bed. I put the tea in her hands, only letting go when I was sure she had a grip. I waited while she sipped at it, waited until some of the color returned to her face.

"Rebecca," I said quietly, kneeling in front of her. "Do you want to talk?"

She looked slightly up at me; between my kneeling position and where she sat on the bed, our eyes were almost level. She took a long sip of the tea, then drained the rest and set the empty cup on the table. When she spoke, her voice was very quiet. "He called me _oneesan_."

The word usually—literally—meant "older sister". It could also be used in some circumstances towards female friends. I had no idea which Reznor had meant—if Camilla had truly reminded him of an older sister, or if he was just using the term colloquially. I nodded, remembering the moment when he'd said it. "Yeah."

"He saved me, Seiji," she said quietly, guiltily. "After I took him within an inch of his life, after I terrified him, even after I glared hatefully at him in that dungeon and thought he'd betrayed us—he saved me. And I let him die. I let them all die. Reznor, Niara, Kezwik… they're all dead because I was too proud to stand down."

"Not too proud," I said, putting my hands on hers. "Too smart. If you'd laid down your weapons one moment sooner, not a one of us would've made it back alive. You bought us the time to recover from the paralysis status."

"I bought that time with three lives," she said miserably, her eyes tearing up again. "And I brought this down on them. If we'd only shut down that stupid story when we had the chance—"

In a sudden flash of insight, I shook my head. "That's not what's really tearing you up."

For a moment, her angst turned to anger, and she directed the full force of it at me, tears dripping down her freckled face. "Really? Then tell me, Freud, what the fuck is it? Because I feel pretty fucking shitty for letting three people die."

"I think you know."

The anger was as short-lived as it was sudden. I could see from the shame in her eyes that she knew exactly what I was talking about, and was trying to shut it out—unsuccessfully. "I couldn't stop myself," she said in an empty voice. "That murdering son of a bitch was sitting there, looking so smug at the idea of going to some player's cushy idea of a prison."

She went on with a choked-off sound that threatened to smother her words. "I just had this vision of whenever we finally clear this game, of him waking up in a hospital bed somewhere like Kayaba said, nobody ever knowing what his real name was, and just walking away from the lives he helped snuff out. No court would ever touch the testimony of what a handful of people saw inside a virtual world, even if we could match up his character with the person himself."

I said nothing. I couldn't. She'd always been better at forming logical arguments like this, and I couldn't think of a thing to say that would take away her shame or refute what she'd said.

"So I pushed it in, just a little. And when I did, when I saw his fear, it was like something snapped. I just kept pushing and pushing and twisting… and when the life went out of his eyes, I watched it go. His brain is a TV dinner now. And I was glad, because he's never going to kill anyone else again."

Silence. Her hands felt cold beneath mine.

And then she raised her eyes to mine, searching for something there. "So why do I feel so shitty about it?"

I sat myself on the bed beside my wife and pulled her into my arms. She went without protest, crying on my shoulder as I rocked her with one arm wrapped tightly around her and the other stroking her hair. "Because you're not what he was," I said after a few moments. "And you never will be."

"Then what am I?" she asked, her voice muffled against my shirt.

The reply was one simple word. I knew it was the only one I needed.

"Loved."

* * *

When morning came, Camilla and I found Diabel waiting downstairs at an empty table. There were no other players; the common room was blessedly empty at the moment. We both went and sat down at Diabel's table without invitation.

As he looked up from his tea, a mask settled across his face. Covering for what, I couldn't tell. My eyes went up and to the left; in the corner of my vision I saw four HP gauges—we were all still partied. Torik's was grayed out, indicating he wasn't in the same area as us.

"Diabel," Camilla began, bowing from her seat. "I regret to say it, but I think this is where we need to part ways."

The mask slipped; for a moment Diabel looked pained. Whether it was at the prospect of losing our skill sets or from one of the many tragedies of the last 24 hours, I didn't know. "Forever?" asked the blue-haired knight. "Just as party members, or as friends?"

"I…" Camilla started to speak, but then trailed off, as if the response had been automatic before she'd really thought about it.

"You're a good friend, Diabel," I said, meaning it. "And an even better leader. If anyone can clear this floor, I believe you will. But we…" I looked at my wife; she nodded.

"We need to be on our own," I went on. "We can't deal with being partied with anyone anymore… not right now, at least. And I don't think we'd be much good to you if we stayed."

Diabel nodded as if he'd expected precisely that answer. He almost looked relieved, although it warred with regret. "I'm very sorry to hear that," he said with sadness in his voice. "The two of you have become an irreplaceable part of this party… and you are my friends. It'll be hard to fill your shoes in the party, and impossible as friends."

"You'll find someone," I said with assurance. "There'll be others who are dedicated to seeing this floor cleared, who will believe in your ideals. Just do what you do, and be who you are. You'll draw them out wherever they are."

Diabel set his elbows on the table and clasped his hands before him, leaning his chin against his thumbs. His eyes closed for a moment, and when they opened, his features were composed. He gestured his menu open and dissolved our party. "What will you do now?" he asked.

"I don't know," I replied.

"Maybe live here for a little while," Camilla said. "Tolbana is a nice town, and we have a fair amount of money right now. We…" She looked at me. "We need some time to ourselves. To find ourselves."

"I see." Diabel nodded to both of us in turn, and began to rise from the table. "It's… it's been an honor having you along."

"The honor," Camilla said firmly, "has been all ours."

As Diabel walked away, my wife and I found each other's hands. We watched until the door of the inn closed behind him with finality, leaving us where we'd always wanted to be in the first place: alone in each other's company.


	20. Epilogue: Party of Two

**December 3rd, 2022  
****Aincrad Floor 1, Town of Tolbana**

Camilla and I watched from just outside the amphitheater as the raid strategy meeting wrapped up. Players milled about in groups of five or six, sometimes in smaller knots as parties divided up into disparate groups of friends who went off their separate ways. Once we were certain that no more actual planning was taking place, we weaved our way through the rows of ancient stone benches until we found Diabel standing in the midst of a large crowd that was just starting to disperse.

We could see Agil's massive frame above everyone else, and were not the least bit surprised that he'd been here—we'd heard him speak up earlier when Kibaou had begun stirring up discontent against the beta testers, and had just begun to ask each other why Diabel let that go on so long when Agil had shut down the abrasive swordsman's shit-stirring with his characteristic good sense. The only thing that had been surprising was the bluntness of the language Agil had used to do so. Our first friend in this game smiled when he saw us, waved, and then went back to the conversation he was having. We'd have to look him up after this—we hadn't reached out to him since we took our hiatus from adventuring, and we both missed him—it was something we'd have to correct.

Kibaou and Diabel were just wrapping up some kind of conversation when we approached. The former scowled at us, but in a perfunctory sort of way—as if he felt obligated to be an asshole but didn't quite have a solid reason at the moment. We ignored it when we saw Diabel's face light up at the sight of us, and had the pleasure of seeing Kibaou look stunned as the raid leader turned away and jogged up to us. "Kadyn! Camilla!"

Our appearances had to be surprising to him. Neither of us were armored, or for that matter even armed. We had our equipment in our inventory, of course, but with no current need for it we were wearing the same kind of "civilian" clothes that we'd been using in the days since he'd last seen us. Camilla was wearing a deep blue dress in the same style as the local NPCs—which had, on more than one occasion, actually caused players who weren't paying close enough attention to _mistake _us for NPCs—and I had on a pair of brown overalls worn over a gray tunic and trousers. We _did_ look like NPCs, if you managed to overlook the cursors and HPs bars hanging around our heads. Every now and then players would give us dirty looks, as if we offended them by simply living our lives rather than fighting on.

"You just missed the raid meeting," Diabel said excitedly, a hand on each of our shoulders. "We found the boss room! And we're going to go clear it tomorrow morning!"

"We heard," Camilla said happily. "We knew you could do it, Diabel. We always believed in you."

Diabel's smile was wan. "Even when few others did. But now look around us." He gestured at the dozens of players that still gathered in the amphitheater, all of them partied up. "It's not a full raid group, but if we all do our best, it should be enough."

"It's all thanks to you," I said, smiling.

But Diabel shook his head. "No," he said with a momentary tinge of sorrow. "It's all due to those who died to get us this far."

A player on the other side of Diabel made a slightly choked-off sound. When we looked, we saw the back of Torik's head as he walked away from the group. "He's been like that ever since," Diabel said sadly. "He handles it well when we're in combat, and usually he's fine company… but anything that reminds him of Niara or how she died breaks him a little bit."

I couldn't blame him—anytime I thought about something similar happening to my wife, I had to shut off the train of thought before it drove me into a dysfunctional state. Sometimes, having an overactive imagination and a wandering mind could be a true curse.

I felt Camilla's hand tighten in mine to the point where I was glad we were in a town where my HP wouldn't drop. She, too, bore the scars of that day, and still blamed herself to some degree for Niara and Reznor's deaths.

"You know," Diabel said suddenly, his face lighting up with hope. "It's not too late to join us. We have one incomplete party that's nothing but a pair of solo players, and if you're quick about it you might be able to catch up with them. Or you can meet up with us tomorrow before we leave, and I'll be happy to introduce you."

Camilla and I took a long look at each other. The idea was tempting—beyond tempting, really. Both of us had been starting to feel restless from our days of downtime and leisure, and a little guilty for not contributing somehow to the clearing of the game. We needed to get back out there, as a duo if nothing else. A raid to clear the first floor boss… it would be history in the making. It would be a chance to help strike a blow that could inspire those still waiting in the Starting City to come out and join the fight to liberate all of us from this Death Game. It would be the fulfillment of Diabel's vision for this game, a vision in which we both still believed.

But I could see the counterargument forming in my wife's mind, even thought she might never say it out loud: _Another chance to be betrayed. Another chance for someone to die because of us._

Both of us, as one, bowed in deep respect to Diabel. "I'm sorry, my friend," I said with genuine and lasting regret. "I don't think we can do that yet."

"But _you_ can," Camilla said emphatically.

Diabel looked between the two of us, a variety of emotions flickering across his face. "I don't deserve your faith," he said. I couldn't even begin to think of what he meant by that.

Camilla released my hand, and stepped forward. She grabbed Diabel and hugged him fiercely; I could see him awkwardly poke at the air behind her and guessed that he'd had to dismiss an anti-harassment pop-up window when she violated his personal space. A few of the players surrounding us snickered; one or two whistled. The whistles doubled and even gained a few uncouth hoots as she drew back and kissed him on the cheek. "Yes you do," she said. "You built this. You brought all of us here. Now go and defeat the boss… for everyone."

"And after you do," I said, reaching out and clasping his hand with both of mine, "look us up. We'll party up again and go out together to explore the new floor that you've opened up for all of us."

"Together," Camilla echoed as she stepped back to my side.

For the first time, I saw something that might have almost been the beginning of tears in Diabel's eyes. "It's a deal," he said.

"It's a promise," I replied.

But despite our promises, despite our faith, it would be the last time we ever saw Diabel. We learned the next day that he'd perished in the raid—the only death to come of the successful clearing of the first floor boss.

Reports of what had happened were conflicting, but they all agreed on a few things: that Diabel had led a valiant charge against the boss when it was down to a sliver of life, and died when the mob's attack pattern changed in an unexpected way that hadn't been in the beta. That his death had been entirely preventable if another beta tester hadn't withheld his knowledge of those attack patterns, and that the only redeeming quality of this _beater_—a silly portmanteau of _beta tester_ and _cheater _that drove Camilla, as a translator, straight up the wall—was that he and a brown-haired rapier user had stepped in and saved the raid from a wipe after Diabel died, taking command and cutting down the boss almost by themselves.

But the floor was cleared. And a few days later, when we felt we had mourned Diabel sufficiently, we gathered our equipment and supplies and set out to explore the second floor of Aincrad without him—but in the memory of what he'd sought to accomplish.

Together.

Together, and alone in our party of two.

****  
おわり  
****

* * *

**Character Name**: Kadyn (ケイディン)  
**Real Name**: Seiji Midorikawa (緑川誓地)  
**Birthplace**: Chiba City, Chiba Prefecture (Japan)  
**Age**: 28

At age 16, Seiji was accepted as an overseas exchange student in a Los Angeles high school. While studying there he met a young girl named Rebecca Riley, who was in need of a Japanese conversation partner for the class she was taking. The two quickly discovered that they shared a mutual enjoyment of the same kinds of video games, and long before they graduated they had become an inseparable couple. After high school they moved to Seiji's native Japan together and married, spending their free time immersed in online games together and always playing as a team—to the point where they called each other by their longtime character names as much as or more than their real names. When Sword Art Online was announced, they tried and failed to enter the closed beta, but succeeded in becoming two of the unlucky ten thousand who were trapped in the Death Game on launch day.

Seiji prefers to play stealthy DPS classes, using tactical positioning and Rebecca's skill at tanking to flank the enemy and deliver critical blows at the right moment. In SAO, he found himself more dependent than ever on his wife's tanking abilities due to the defensive limitations of a pure dagger build, but in a party with a good tank keeping the mob's attention his damage potential is considerable.

**Character Name**: Camilla (カミーラ)  
**Real Name**: Rebecca Midorikawa (緑川レベカ)  
**Birthplace**: San Francisco, California (USA)  
**Age**: 27

Rebecca had been an obsessive online gamer since she was old enough to go on the Internet by herself, and when she met Seiji in high school she was serving as the main tank of a weekend raiding guild. She recruited her future husband to play an assassin class, and as the two spent more and more time playing as guildmates in the game and as conversation partners in real life, they knew that they were meant to be together. Sword Art Online was to be like a dream come true for her; she had always yearned for the day when technology would allow gamers to _live_ in the worlds they played instead of just watching them on a screen. Instead it became a nightmare in which she and her husband were trapped.

With her aggressive nature and nobility of spirit, as well as years of experience playing tank classes, Rebecca found her calling in SAO as Seiji's sword and shield. She relishes her role, bearing the brunt of enemy attacks and hate while her partner cuts them down from behind.

* * *

**Author's afterword: **Thank you very much to everyone who's read the story, left feedback and reviews, or sent me PMs! It's been extremely helpful in motivating me to finish this story.

It also helped that I was uncommonly inspired-I think this may be the first time I've turned out 60,000 words in a single week, ever. When I began the story I wasn't quite sure how far I wanted to take it—I just knew I wanted to tell the story of Seiji and Rebecca's first day or two in the game, wanted to try to create a rich, human, and psychologically intense perspective on that time. But as the chapters with Agil, Kibaou and Reznor started coming together, I was struck with exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to fill in the timeskip that exists in canon between the first day and Aria in the Starless Night. I've always found something compelling about Diabel's character, and I wanted to try exploring the path that took him on his tragic quest to beat the first floor boss from the perspective of those who traveled with him for a time. When did he realize who Kirito was? When did he start plotting to thwart Kirito in LAing the boss? Those who've only seen the anime might have missed some of the subtle references to that side plot, which were glossed over in the anime adaptation—but I hope they were enjoyed by those who've read the LNs.

I also hope all of you enjoyed the OCs of Kadyn and Camilla. I wanted them to be real people—flawed, human people—so in keeping with the mantra of "writing what you know", I drew aspects of their personalities from the many, many gamers and guildies I've known or partied with over the years. The concept of Camilla's unusual (for a foreigner) accent, as just one example, is based on an American man I knew on a Japanese-language list many years ago who spoke fluently in Osaka dialect because that's what his wife spoke. They're not based on any one person in particular—least of all myself—but I hope their humanity and authenticity came through.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge that there are a handful of minor continuity errors or ambiguities that don't affect the story in any meaningful way, some of which I'll be going back and cleaning up as time allows.  
* The Monument of Life is in what used to be the respawn area in Black Iron Castle in the Starting City, not the courtyard plaza where everyone first spawns. The obelisk in the center of the plaza is the bell tower. I'll have to do a fair amount of rewriting on a couple of early chapters to correct that, but it doesn't materially affect the story.  
* Healing and teleport crystals typically don't start dropping until a few floors higher, but since Kirito is an Unreliable Narrator and the LNs are prone to contradicting themselves all over the place about things like this, I reasoned it was plausible they could be still found as rare named drops and sold for exorbitant prices in those first few days, when no one really knew what the drop rates and economy were going to be like anyway. Anyone who's ever seen what happens to the price of new Collectibles and such when a new EQ2 expansion comes out will know what I mean.  
* It's never explicitly defined in the LNs exactly what the skill slot progression is by level, although some fans have extrapolated their own interpretation from the character bios in the Material Edition supplements. Some allowance should be made for this ambiguity.  
* The SAO launch day was a week after the product was released in stores, not the same day. Oops. An easy fix that has no effect on the story.

Thank you all for reading!

-Catsy


End file.
